


Losses and Gains

by orphan_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Minor Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Self-Harm, minor Mon-El/Kara Danvers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 03:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9949385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "You're either a part of this family or you're not."Winn wouldn't lie about this, Kara knows that. She knows that he wouldn't make Mon El tell her if it wasn't a problem. Maybe that's why it hurts so much to choose herself this time, to not choose Alex. She breaks herself apart with her choice, but Kara is the last daughter of Krypton. She needs to live for Kal, for this world she's adopted.She needs to live for Alex, even if Alex hates her for it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be a oneshot, but I like switching PoVs and I have never been able to do that in oneshots, so you get a multi-chapter. Watch as 2x14 josses the underlying foundation of this story but that's the glory of fanfiction. 
> 
> Hopefully this only has like one or two more chapters. I don't really like how it turned out but I want to see it to the end.

There’s a warning in Alex’s eyes as she looks at her, a question and a plea mixed together with an anger Kara has only rarely seen directed at her since that first year on Earth. She knows that she shouldn’t believe Mon El, knows that going with him instead of staying, instead of sitting and pretending that she isn’t suspicious of Jeremiah, will look like she’s chosen, but she can’t do this. She can’t risk Kal for Alex, can’t risk herself like this.

_“You’re either a part of this family or you’re not.”_

She pulls away from her hold, moves to the door, Alex’s ultimatum ringing in her ears even after so long. She remembers the twist of her gut, the anger, the loss on hearing those words fall from her lips.

She hadn’t thought about it then, but turning back to look at Alex, Kara has to wonder if Alex had ever really forgiven her for what she’d said when she had been infected with red kryptonite, if she will ever forgive her for leaving now.

“Kara.”

She shakes her head, opens the door and leaves. If she’d stayed, she knows that she would have asked. She doesn’t want to know the answer, doesn’t want to see it confirmed in Alex’s expression as she tries to come up with an answer.

She frowns as she makes her way to the alley next to her building.

Would she even know if Alex is lying to her?

Part of her wants to believe that she would, wants to believe that she knows Alex better than anyone, but she’s not sure of that anymore. She’s not sure if she ever really knew Alex, if she ever really knew more than the other woman wanted her to know.

She doesn’t bother changing as she takes off, not wanting to be nearby long enough for someone to find her. Kara knows that it’s dangerous, that she could be exposed like this, but she doesn’t care, not just then.

Cold wind whips against her face as she flies, not fast enough to reach sub sonic speeds but not slow enough to be seen either. She doesn’t push herself, wanting only to get lost in the feeling that comes when she’s in the air, too far for human eyes to see.

There’s a small pressure on her chest as she barrel rolls into the thermosphere. She can feel the weight of the air pressing down on her, telling her to return to the ground, but she pushes past it, forces herself into a series of complicated maneuvers she’s seen in the recordings of her aunt’s battles with the DEO.

Astra lives in her blood, she thinks grimly as she moves, lives in that hollow place beneath her heart where she keeps her darker thoughts hidden. She’s become another loss, another regret that she can’t get rid of.

She should let go, she thinks as she moves to dive, should stop thinking about that day, about truces with Non and the anger at J’onn she has never quite let go, the anger at Alex. She should stop thinking at all.

The fall from one layer of the atmosphere to another would kill a human, would burn their bodies into dark, charred skeletons telling stories of brutality, of chaos. She remembers stories of Icarus descending from on high, wanting only to touch the sun and failing, of Daedalus having to find his son, to find the remains of a child lost to the harshness of the air.

Once upon a time, Alex made her watch the _Avatar_ cartoons, made her fall in love with Aang and his story as a survivor, as the last son of a dead nation struggling to live with the legacy, the burden of his people and his role. She had liked him better than Icarus, liked that child of the air who had never forgotten the core of his people, of his past. She had liked the hope inherent to his story, the promise of rebuilding what he had lost, making it better.

She had liked it then, but she understood Icarus more, understood how much being too close to the sun could hurt. After all, how many times had she tried to get close to Alex, to Kal? How many times had she burned herself up in the act?

Alex had come around after, had given up everything for her, she now knows, but still, that fear lingers, that pre-emptive feeling of loss every time she looks at her and wonders if this is the day Alex will remember that Kara stole her family away. Still the fear remains that Alex will stop choosing her one day.

* * *

 

She lands with a thud in the tundra of Siberia. There’s so little life there, but what does exist clings to existence with a desperation Kara feels in the very earth. It’s not like the Arctic, so reminiscent of the ice wastes on Krypton, but it’s still barren, lonely.

She sinks to her knees, arms wrapping around her body in futility as she tries to keep the hurt in and fails. There’s a terrible screaming echoing in her ears, a sound that shakes her to the core, even after she realizes that it comes from her.

It’s raw, a release of suppressed rage and grief aimed at her aunt, at Alex, her parents, herself. It is a need to shake off this burden, this legacy of pain that lives inside of her.

Her phone sounds, Alex’s ringtone vibrating against her hip more than the song reaching her ears. She thinks about answering it, about crawling back to her and pretending that everything is okay, that she’s Sunshine Danvers who smiles and smiles and never cries, never hurts. She thinks about acting like she’s in love with Mon El, about acting like everything’s okay again.

She thinks and she decides.

* * *

 

Opening the door, she shoves a carton of ice cream into Alex’s hands before moving to take her seat at the table with a smile. She doesn’t feel it, not really, but she can be here. She can do this.

She doesn’t look at Jeremiah throughout dinner, doesn’t not look at him. She wants to, needs to be reminded of the kind of man he had been before he was taken, of the man who had helped her when she had been captured, but she’s scared of what she will see, scared of what she will know if she does.

If he and Eliza notice, they don’t say anything, too caught up in their reunion to bring attention to her. She’s grateful, not wanting to take that away from them, not wanting to hurt them if it turns out that Winn is wrong.

Alex doesn’t notice, too enamoured with Maggie to see, to care. It stings, a little, to think that Alex could be so oblivious to the image she helped to craft but Kara pushes it aside, forces herself to keep smiling even after it becomes painful.

Or has it always hurt this much? She can’t tell, not really.

Mon El’s hand finds its way to her leg, squeezes. He can’t see through her smile, she knows, but he’s still there, still willing to sit by her when he knows that Jeremiah could be dangerous. She doesn’t want him there but, at the same time, she clings to him, throws herself into the effort of keeping this relationship going when every part of her screams to get away from him, to stop catering to his feelings.

When it moves higher, Kara flinches, moves to push it away. She doesn’t want to ruin this, doesn’t want to break the illusion she’s trying to create, but her skin is crawling.

“Kara…”

She doesn’t miss the warning in his voice, the want, but she doesn’t want to respond to it. She doesn’t want to continue this when every part of her is aching to get away from him.

She makes a weak excuse, walks to the kitchen with enough speed that she almost misses the feeling of eyes on her back. Kara doesn’t look back, doesn’t give Mon El the benefit of acknowledging his gaze as she makes a beeline for the refrigerator.

Somehow, she has leftovers from the night before, potstickers hiding behind boxes of chicken and broccoli. There’s food on the table where she left it but she needs this, needs something that reminds her of home, no matter how little they actually resemble the dumplings her father used to bring her when he returned from exploring the outer edges of Kandor.

“Kara? There’s food out there, you know.”

She looks up from her potstickers at the sound of Maggie’s voice, wonders for a moment if she should say something, anything. She knows that she can trust her, knows that Maggie is a good person, but that’s all she knows about her and right now that’s not good enough, not for her.

Kara knows what she wants, but it’s gone, destroyed by her people’s hubris, by her own family’s secrets.

Suddenly the potstickers don’t taste as good as they once did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, no longer two or three chapters but a full-fledged multi-chapter being planned. Have fun.

Kara doesn’t speak to her throughout dinner. Nothing more than requests to pass one item or the other pass between them, words not enough to bridge the gap that’s been created.

No one notices, of course. They’ve both learnt how to lie, how to build a construct of perfect felicity when all they want to do is scream at the world, to scream at each other. Kara is better, has been at this longer, but Alex can see through her, can see how uncomfortable she is there with her dad feet away from her.

That old, familiar urge comes back to her, the need to wrap her arms around her lost, little Kryptonian almost overwhelming, but she doesn’t. She’s still angry, still hurt by Kara’s accusations, her doubt. She still feels the sting from Kara not being able to look at her father, to see the man that took her in when she was younger.

She still feels the way her words wrapped around Alex’s heart, feels the way they slid like knives into the spaces between her ribs, shattering the safe haven where Kara used to be. It hurts, hurts so much that she reaches for her wine automatically, downs it in one before refilling the glass.

Maggie’s hand reaches out to her, a subtle shake of her head enough to make Alex back down, to let go of the glass as she leans into her girlfriend. She turns away from Kara, away from the reminder of what’s left unsaid and smiles, listens as her dad tells them story after story about the days before CADMUS, before everything fell apart.

If they don’t talk about after, about what happened to him, about what Lillian Luthor and her pet soldiers must have done, she doesn’t notice, doesn’t care. Alex knows that she should know, that she should push for those stories, but this isn’t the time, the place. She doesn’t want to discover that her father isn’t the same man who would carry her on his shoulders just to prevent her feet from hurting, the same man who would hold her at night, tell her the names of the stars and the bones in her body.

That Kara wants to take that from her, to destroy that, isn’t fair.

* * *

 

She’s fairly sure that she’s drunk by the time dinner is over and she’s slipping on her jacket. Maggie is holding on to her, steadying her with a firm hand on her elbow, but everything still sways a little. Alex kind of prefers it this way, prefers the way the world moves to having to face Kara, having to see the plea for her to believe, to give her a chance.

They don’t speak as they leave, don’t say anything. She can’t look at her, can’t give in. She’s given Kara everything, given her her entire life. She can’t give her her father, can give her one of the few things that doesn’t make her feel wrong, feel less.

Her fingers shake when they get to the car, unable to hold her keys properly, much less get them into the lock. Maggie takes the keys from her, pushes Alex to the passenger side, where she collapses gratefully, curling into herself immediately.

“Hey,” her girlfriend says gently when she gets into the driver’s seat. “Try to relax, Danvers. It’s over and we’re going home, okay?”

She runs her fingers across Alex’s shoulders as she speaks, trying to coax her into a more comfortable position. Alex doesn’t want to, but she finds herself uncurling anyway, melting into Maggie’s touch just enough that the other woman feels comfortable starting the car.

They don’t speak on the way. Alex isn’t sure of what she should say, if she should say anything at all. She knows that Maggie has spoken to Kara, knows that something has shifted between the two, but Alex doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know why Maggie returned to the table with a clenched jaw, why Kara looked so lost when she came back.

Then again, how could she not know? How could she not remember exactly what Kara chose?

* * *

 

Alex doesn’t see Kara the next morning. Her phone is silent, her lab empty. It worries her for a moment but then she remembers Mon-El, remembers the way his arm curled around her when she returned from the kitchen.

Part of her twists at that, burns. She has to remind herself that this is what Kara chose. This is what she wanted and Alex won’t interfere, won’t say anything. Kara has to fall on her own, has to live with her choices.

Her thoughts are interrupted by her father’s entrance, his questions about her research. She’s all too happy to answer him, to share her work like she used to, back when it was mud volcanoes and atom models instead of genetics and reverse engineering alien DNA.

For a while, it feels good. It feels like the kind of normal she used to have, like something Alex hasn’t really felt in a long time. It’s something she doesn’t want to lose, something she wants to keep as long as she can.

Jeremiah feels comfortable, she thinks, feels like the ground beneath her feet when she runs, always there, even when she’s moving in a way that very few people in her life are. He’s calm and serene, makes her feel okay as she works, like she’s finally meeting some kind of standard that she’s never quite met before.

It feels…good, she thinks. It doesn’t quite feel like home anymore, but Alex has felt adrift for so long, unanchored as everything changes, that having her father there, arguing over mitochondria jokes and haemoglobin content puns feels almost right. She doesn’t think she can get anything better at that moment.

Her phone sounds off, Fleetwood Mac echoing in the lab’s open air before she can pick up Maggie’s call. Glancing at Jeremiah sheepishly, she moves to a corner, her voice quiet.

“Danvers. What’s up?”

There’s gunfire in the background, an all too familiar groan nearby. She frowns as she starts moving, stripping off her lab coat. Waving at her father, Alex switches her phone to Bluetooth as she heads over to the command center.

“Maggie?”

“Sorry, Danvers,” Maggie says, sounding out of breath. “We have a situation near the warehouse district. Know anything about Thanagarians?”

Alex motions for Winn’s attention, mouths the word to him as she listens.

“What’s going on?”

“A couple of them started stirring up trouble. No idea why they’re in a chemical storage area yet, but it looks bad. Supergirl, stop!”

A crash, the sizzle of electricity. Alex is halfway to pushing Winn aside, conducting the search on her own, when Maggie speaks again.

“They must have some kind of kryptonite embedded in their weapons because Supergirl is taking damage fast. How quick can you get your guys over here?”

Alex shakes her head, forgetting for a moment that Maggie can’t see her. She won’t be able to mobilise a team in time, not if she wants to make it before Kara is knocked out. By the sounds of it, she’s already too close.

Examining the information that Winn’s managed to find, a plan begins to form. If she can do this, if she can pull it off before J’onn comes back, she might even avoid desk duty.

Grabbing Winn by the collar, Alex makes her decision.

* * *

 

By the time they arrive, Kara is nowhere in sight. Maggie meets her at the van, briefing her quickly as they rush over to where the fight has moved into one of the empty warehouses.

“They’re supposed to be refugees from some kind of purge on Thanagar, but they were saying something that riled your alien up. No idea what it was because Supergirl didn’t bother translating for me before she did the whole up, up and away thing to follow them.”

Alex curses Kara’s recklessness, not looking forward to the mess she’s going to be in. She checks her weapons, moving for one of the rocket launchers before Maggie grabs her arm.

“Those would work on a Thanagarian just as well as it would on a Kryptonian and these guys are seasoned warriors. Do you really think they’d be above using Supergirl as a shield?”

Maggie’s right, she thinks, looking for something, anything else. Most of the weapons here won’t work, not when she has to account for injured Kryptonians and anything else these guys might use.

There’s no time to create anything, no time to adjust what she already has. Her only option is to rush in, to join the fight and hope that she can get Kara out of there before any permanent damage is done to her.

Winn approaches as she’s grabbing a titanium alloy katana, shifting from one foot to the next. There’s a small, familiar black box in his hands, one she’s seen somewhere before but can’t place.

“A black body field generator. I refined the model we made at L-Corp’s gala and—”

“No time, Winn,” she mutters, adding to her belt. “You can nerd out later. Is it set to whatever frequency the Thanagarians are using?”

“Yes?”

“Winn…”

“We haven’t had to fight them before so there really isn’t any data available for me to use. I had to guess.”

Alex shakes her head. If it doesn’t work, she’ll kill him later, but she’s willing to take the chance now. She can’t just leave Kara to be beaten like this, even with everything that’s between them at the moment. She doesn’t want to deal with that either, but it really doesn’t matter.

Strapping the sword to her back, she motions for the other two to stay there as she moves in. She can’t afford to have any civilian casualties on something that technically isn’t a DEO assignment, and she’s not going to risk Maggie and Winn on a hunch.

It’s better if it’s her. She’s expendable enough that she can stand to be bait as long as she can get Kara out of there.

As soon as she’s clear of the door, Alex presses herself against the wall to gauge the situation. There are two males somewhere to the left of her, their wings extended, weapons primed as Kara flies at them from the right.

Alex watches as the larger of the two Thanagarians uses his mace to fling Kara back, the air buzzing as electricity makes contact with her. There’s a sickening crunch and faint swearing as Kara tries and fails to get up, green lines pulsing out from various parts of her body. The other two aliens laugh in response, cold and cruel to Alex’ s ears.

She uses their distraction to move forward, pushing down on the button to activate the field generator as she slides under their feet. Jamming the blade of the sword into the wooden floor, Alex uses her momentum to flip up and catch the smaller one’s shins.

He hisses, tries to hit her with the hammer he’s using. The force is enough to make her curse, but there’s no current. The black body field worked, neutralizing the attack enough that it lets her get another hit in before Kara can muster up enough energy to join her. The second hit feels like she’s kicking steel, her bone jarring with the energy that dissipates through her body, causing her to fall.

Kara catches her, places her on the ground. She wants to protest, to hold her back, but as Alex watches, Kara tackles both Thanagarians, hits them with as much speed as she can produce in such a small amount of time.

The crater that’s created is deep, too deep for her to see, and Alex worries for a moment that Kara has done something she can’t come back from. Only, she does, floating tiredly to the surface with two unconscious aliens in hand.

Dropping them at Alex’s feet, Kara mutters a tired, “Finally,” and then falls into her arms, eyes rolling back, body dripping with blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have they made up? No. Will they make up? THINGS HAPPEN FIRST. Not the thing you want, but the thing I want because Alex is lame right now. She needs to level up. SHE WILL LEVEL UP. And then the thing will happen.
> 
> This is still not a story I like but I'm going to do this.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited: I was supposed to do this last night but I've been really exhaused lately. The Karamel scene at the end is dub-con het sex. Thanks to the anon in the comments for reminding me about that. Really sorry for not warning about it when I posted it.
> 
> More notes at the end.

There’s something pressing against her ribs when Kara wakes. It’s firm but soft at the same time, an impossibility that Kara hasn’t felt since she was thirteen and panicking over all the new sensations she’d been exposed to under this sun.

Opening her eyes a little, she groans from the pain of moving to investigate. Her body aches, hurts so much without the benefit of her healing factor. It pulls her in a thousand directions, tears at her sanity as she tries and fails to suppress a gasp.

“Hey, hey, hey. Take it slowly. We don’t know how well the meds are going to respond to your Kryptonian genes.”

She pulls away from Alex, pain knifing through her ribs as she moves. Kara doesn’t want to deal with this, doesn’t want to pretend that everything is okay when it feels so wrong, feels like she’s breaking without Alex.

It hurts, but Kara moves as far from her as she can, scared for the first time of this woman who’s been her light for so long. She’s afraid of everything that Alex represents right now and it feels like that first year at the Danvers’ all over again.

Her phone vibrates against her side where someone must have placed it. Looking down, she reads all of the messages Mon-El has sent, each one progressively angrier than the last. With a sinking stomach, she replies, promises to see him later that night in an effort to placate him.

She doesn’t want to think about what she’s just promised, doesn’t want to think about how her skin crawls at the idea. He wants her, is the only one that really wants her.

“Kara, honey?”

She looks up at Jeremiah, wonders when he arrived. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t even noticed his entrance.

“I….sorry?”

“I was trying to find out how you’re feeling. We need to know how to calibrate your medication.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kara replies, motions slow as she tries to get off the bed. Alex is there as soon as she stands, but she shrugs the other woman off, uses whatever she can hold on to as she grabs her clothes, makes her way to the bathroom. “It would just wear off in a few hours anyway once my powers come back.”

“The wait time between has shortened?”

She shrugs. She’d never really been interested in looking at that part of her biology, content to leave that to Alex. She didn’t want to know the first time and she still doesn’t want to know.

Without her powers, she doesn’t feel like herself, doesn’t feel like her body is her own and she just wants that to go away. She wants to feel like herself again, to feel the rush of Sol’s energy in her blood, the lightness it gives her.

She wants to feel something other than this heaviness that’s settled over her, something other than this lack of something she can’t name.

Alex doesn’t stop her when she comes out, dressed and ready to go. She doesn’t reach out, doesn’t try to make Kara stay. Somehow, that hurts more than her injuries, hurts more than seeing Alex happy with Jeremiah when she’s…

She shakes her head, steps around the pair. Faintly, she hears Jeremiah calling out to her, telling her that they need to run more tests, but she ignores it, heads to J’onn’s office instead. Her mind is loud, her senses dulled enough that she can actually hear the thoughts that she doesn’t want.

J’onn looks up when she enters, waits for her to speak. She doesn’t know why she’s even here, why she chose this place above all else, but Kara does know that being around the Martian calms her a bit. She’s never been more grateful that his empathetic abilities actually work on her when she’s without her powers.

“I should debrief!” she blurts out, the words coming quickly as she explains what happened with the Thanagarians. By the time she’s finished, he’s leaning back, looking at her over fisted fingers as she sinks into the couch across from his desk.

“And you’re only mentioning this now?”

He’s calm. There’s no incredulity, no surprise or anger in his voice. Kara can’t read him, can’t tell if she’s in trouble or not. It makes her shrink into herself, makes her want to be smaller. She tries not to, but she ends up pulling her feet up onto the couch, holding her knees while she tries to avoid J’onn’s gaze.

“There wasn’t time,” Kara says softly. “They were going to pollute the city’s water supply with some pretty heavy toxins and I just couldn’t let them get away with it.”

“You could have called for backup. Detective Sawyer did.”

Again, there’s nothing in his voice. No judgement, no admonition. Just calm. It freaks her out a little, makes her squirm in her seat.

“There wasn’t time,” she stresses, fingers tapping out a quick, staccato rhythm on her skin. “They were leaving to do it. I had to go after them. Besides, I didn’t want to bother Alex about it when I could handle the situation myself.”

J’onn finally reacts to that, eyebrow raising as he lowers his hands.

“Their weapons had kryptonite embedded in them. You would have been beaten and electrocuted to death if Alex hadn’t arrived. Then you proceeded to blow out your powers, nearly killing them in the process. You’re lucky more didn’t happen.”

She knows that. Kara knows just how lucky she is that Maggie called Alex, that she was concerned enough to call in her…she doesn’t even know what Alex is anymore…that she knew to do that. Kara knows exactly how reckless she’d been, but she couldn’t help herself.

There was this need to move, to do something other than wait. The urgency of that need, the pull of it is still in her bones, her muscles. She has to get out of there, to do something, anything.

Kara doesn’t say any more, standing too quickly. J’onn moves to help her, but she’s already half hobbling out of his office, determined to get out of there.

The walls are closing in, everything becoming too loud for her. It’s as if she has her powers back, except the emptiness is still there, the sounds closing in on her, choking instead of overwhelming her.

Somehow, J’onn knows this, knows what she needs, because he’s phasing her through the walls, helping her get out of the building, flying her home as fast as he can. She clings to him, her fist tightening against his clothes until she’s being deposited on her couch.

Kara sends him away after he helps her into her room, closes the windows and blinds until she’s encased in darkness. It’s not enough, but she needs him to leave, needs to be alone.

Fumbling with her phone, she sends a text, a request for solitude that she hopes is enough to put off the inevitable.

* * *

 

There’s a dull ache in her head, a warning of the things to come, if she pays attention to it for too long. She doesn’t want to, but Kara knows that she has to, that Alex would kill her if she ignored anything that was even slightly out of the ordinary.

Not that Alex cares, she thinks, as she gets up, limps to her closet. Her ribs feel like they’re on fire when she tries to reach up for the extra heavy blankets Alex had made sure to add to her apartment, the weight almost too much as she staggers back.

Kara grits her teeth, steadies herself against the doorframe before trying to turn. One foot in front of the other, she thinks as she forces herself to move. Just put one foot in front of the other, keep moving like Dory keeps swimming.

Alex hated that movie, but she had secretly loved it. Kara knows it, remembers ignoring the way Alex would try to hide her efforts to wipe away her tears. She still remembers the way Alex felt warm that night as she held Kara’s hand, comforted her as she walked down the street in Midvale, tired and worn out from the emotions the film had coaxed out of her.

The darkness and weight of the blankets are a comfort, dampening out the sensory overload she’s suddenly more vulnerable to. She shouldn’t want to, shouldn’t enjoy this, but she does more than she knows.

The quiet reminds her of the Phantom Zone, of years and years spent in the dark, hoping that she wasn’t too late, wanting to go home, to bathe in Rao’s light. It reminds her of despair and hope warring with each other, of dreams made, destroyed, only to be remade again.

This feels like it, feels like she’s still there, still floating in a dark too thick to be lit by stars.

There’s a knock at her door. It surprises her, forces her to curl deeper into her blankets as she whimpers at the sound.

Keys jingle. She expects Alex, thinks it’s her because who else would have a key to her apartment but her?

Only, it’s not.

Maggie’s voice rings out into the empty quiet, an inquiry, a search. She whimpers as it hits her, like knives stabbing into her ears, bleeding into her brain, but Kara doesn’t answer, can’t answer.

“Come on, Little Danvers. I’m not gonna yell at you or anything.” She’s closer now, her feet echoing against the floorboards. “Alex sent me to make sure you got in okay. Said something about you not wanting her around for a while?”

Kara whines, unable to push herself deeper into her safe haven.  There’s silence for a moment, then a weight pressing down on the bed beside her, on the blankets above her.

The layers are peeled back slowly, exposing her to the open air and Maggie’s concern. She wants to grab them from her, pull them back up, but without her strength, the pain is too much for Kara too move through, too little strength to even win in a game of tug of war against her.

“Oh Little Danvers, your sister’s gonna be pissed at me if she finds out about this.”

She’s wrong, Kara thinks. Alex isn’t going to care. She has her family now, has everything she wants and Kara has…

Kara knows what she has, knows what she’s lost because of her choices. She doesn’t know where Alex stands, but she knows it’s not this, not sending someone in her place when she knows just how vulnerable Kara can be like this.

The thought stings, pushes at her when she remembers him saying that last night, remembers the way Mon-El had reassured her that he’d be there in her place after she’d let go, let herself cry over the break in her relationship with Alex. He’d been right about Jeremiah, so why not this too?

Maggie guides her up, pulls her out of bed. Supporting her weight, the detective moves her out to the couch. Once Kara’s seated, her back against the armrest, she disappears for a few minutes. When she reappears, it’s with a damp washcloth and fresh blankets.

“Alex,” she says by way of explanation, leaving Kara confused. “Anyway, come on, Kara. We gotta get you cleaned up and then you can have the new blankets. I was given very strict instructions not to let you into the shower, so this is going to have to do.”

Her hands are gentle on Kara’s body, more mindful of her injuries that Kara had thought she would be. Maggie wipes at her face, her arms, with a care that she’s not expecting. She knows that she loves Alex, that she’s not a bad person, but this is not something she’s come to expect from too many people lately, not since Lucy left.

A sob traps itself in her throat. Kara plays it off as Maggie pressing against one of her injuries, but she can’t help herself. She feels so lonely and Maggie reminds her of Lucy in that moment, of the time after Alex and Hank had gone on the run when Lucy would sit with her like this after missions, would make her feel less alone.

Still, Maggie seems to catch it, seems to know that she doesn’t want to talk about it. Handing the washcloth to Kara, she gestures for her to continue as she leaves again. She takes her time wiping her body down, careful not to touch any of her more sensitive areas, not to reveal too much in case the other woman comes back too soon.

It takes a while, but Maggie comes back, her iPod in hand. Kara doesn’t have one, has crushed too many phones to trust herself with even that, but she appreciates it when Maggie offers her the headset that’s already plugged in.

She’s surprised when Maggie turns it on and there’s only white noise. It relaxes her, blocks out the rest of the world, allowing her to sink into the dark silence that she’s been dreading and seeking since she got back to her apartment. The warmth of Maggie’s presence beside her, close but not quite touching, helps, pushes her to relax.

They stay like that for the rest of the day, neither speaking nor moving. It’s nice, almost. It’s like having Alex back but not quite, Kara all too aware of the differences between the two.

It makes her almost sorry when Maggie leaves. She wants her to stay, to be the one in Alex’s place, if only for tonight, instead of her boyfriend, who’s standing in the doorway.

Kara won’t meet his eyes, can’t meet his eyes. She’s done nothing, but there’s something about his glare that makes her feel guilty, makes her feel as if she’s done something wrong, as if she hurt him somehow.

She hates that she makes him feel this way, that she makes him so weak, so she looks away. If she doesn’t see it, she tells herself, doesn’t see his pain, it doesn’t feel like she’s failing so much.

* * *

 

Mon-El is rough with her. It’s partially anger, a rage that she recognizes beneath her own skin mirrored in the way he presses into her, the way he holds her down. It’s partially an apology for not being there, for not helping her.

He hadn’t listened to her, had not stayed away, but she can’t blame him, can’t help but accept that he was worried about her. He doesn’t say it, but it’s there in the lines of his shoulders, the way he tenses his jaw so much like…

Kara doesn’t follow that thought, doesn’t let herself think about it. There’s nothing visually similar enough for her to make the comparison, nothing that justifies it when she’s in bed with her boyfriend inside of her. She shouldn’t even be thinking about it, not really.

She should be thinking about him, should be with him, here, in her bed. She should focus on what he wants, on making him feel good. She has to make it up to him, wants to make it up to him.

He growls, catches her attention roughly before running a soothing thumb across her cheek. She leans into it, lets him kiss her as he rocks into her once more.

She wants this, this vestige of Krypton, of her home. She wants this. She wants this, she wants this, she wants this. She doesn’t want anything else. She can’t want anything else.

It doesn’t matter that she’s hurt, that she can barely think without her chest burning in a pain that goes beyond the physical. She wants this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So um, this nonsense is gonna continue for at least two more chapters. The next one isn't Kara's PoV, so thankfully not much is in there from her experience, but it's gonna be there. I'm still working out the details of the plot, but I have a general idea of what I want to do and where this is headed.
> 
> If you can pick up what's going on, then I'm happy, but feel free to ask if you can't. This is a slightly complicated thing I'm trying, because I've never done it before, and now I'm doing it in two fics, so there's that.
> 
> On that note, this fic is going to be romantic Kalex. At this point, as with all my romantic Kalex, it's not canon and it wasn't meant to be a canon rewrite, not completely anyway. It was just me trying to see how I would develop this plot if I was writing it, with my ideas and my execution in mind. So, if anyone doesn't want to read Kalex in that way, I'd suggest either leaving or heading over to my SuperCorp fic or "the art of breaking", which is a platonic take on another direction this plot could have gone that utilises the sloppy execution of 2x14 as a basis for the actual story and may get a sequel if I can come up with one. As long as you're respectful about either choice, I have no issue. I'll be sorry that you're gone but also, please love yourself and don't read anything that you don't ship.
> 
> Characters that will not appear: James, Cat, Lena, Lucy (as much as that last one pains me because Major Lane is perfect). Minor appearances to Eliza and Vasquez as needed.
> 
> One other thing of note: I'm not too sure about the tags. The rating went up to M for the Karamel stuff at the end, but there's no sex in it otherwise. You'll see why in time. Other than that, I tried to tag for triggery stuff but if you feel the need for another tag, let me know and help me to understand why, and I'll add it.
> 
> All of that being said, stop by at racetothedge on tumblr and talk to me about Moana. I wanna talk about my asexual wayfinder child and her relationships with Te Fiti and Maui.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two days after I was supposed to post this, but I got sick and school things came up. Enjoy!

She paces her lab as she listens to Maggie, hearing only half of what she says as she tries to work out the calculations for Kara’s solar flares. She won’t let Alex help her, won’t let her touch her, but she doesn’t want to leave her alone, doesn’t want to leave her to her self-flagellation. She doesn’t want to leave her to tear herself apart over this.

She’s still angry, still smarting over Kara’s choices, but she can’t watch her hurt, can’t look at her without aching to hold her. Alex knows it’s wrong, knows that Kara’s turned her back on their family, but she can’t help but need her. She can’t help but want her here by her side so that she can run her hands down her body, check her for injuries, for imperfections in an already perfect form.

There’s a rage coursing in her blood, a need to punish those who’ve ruined Kara, who have made her feel like less than human in her physicality. The need to protect her, to keep the world away from her, that’s always been there, has only increased in the past few days, almost consumed her at the worst times.

Alex glances at Maggie then, wonders if the other woman can see it, if she knows all the ways in which she’s failed to do what she’s dedicated her life to. She wonders if Maggie would even understand, if she’d see why Alex has to do this, why she can’t just leave Kara alone, even as she’s too scared to approach her.

“Hey, Mags?” she asks, her voice quiet. “Could you check up on Kara for me? She left before we could do anything for her.”

There’s more to that request, but she’s too scared to ask, too scared to admit to her own failings in front of Maggie. She’s too scared to admit that she can’t face Kara without feeling the burn of shame making its way through her.

Thankfully, Maggie agrees, kisses her cheek before leaving to do what Alex can’t. It grates on her that she has to do this, that she has to hide behind her girlfriend, but Kara needs someone who isn’t her, needs someone who can take care of her better than Alex can.

* * *

She doesn’t want to admit that she’s out here, that she’s even thinking about this, but Alex can’t let the Thanagarians go unpunished. She can’t just let them get away with hurting Kara like that.

Her fists clench around the batons in her hand, thumbs rubbing against the handles as she contemplates the aliens in the cell. It would be so easy to do this, to take out her anger on them the way she wants to. It would be so easy to just let go and feel.

A hand clamps down on her shoulder while the batons are pried away gently. Growling, she spins to face J’onn.

“Beating them isn’t going to help your sister.”

She clenches her jaw.

“They nearly killed Kara, J’onn. They can’t just get away with it.”

“And they won’t, but we need them alive.” He stares at her for a moment, his probing making her brain itch. Alex narrows her eyes and he backs off. “They have information that we can use, if that helps. Killing them would be counterproductive to what we’re trying to do here.”

She backs down at that reminder, lets herself relax under his gaze. She doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t want to admit to her wrongs, but she can’t help but deflate as the fight goes out of her.

“She nearly died, J’onn. How can I face Kara and not see how reckless she’s being with her life?”

He doesn’t answer, not right away. Instead, J’onn walks her away from the cells, towards his office. Alex wants to protest, to break away from him and go back to the lab, to the comms center, anywhere that he isn’t, but she follows him anyway.

The echo of whispers in silent halls follows them, agents gossiping about their daily lives, their loves, their families. It’s mundane, painfully so, sets Alex’s teeth on edge. There’s never been any such thing as normal in her life, never been anything approaching the level of teeth grindingly boring that this all seems to be.

She never really had a chance to be normal, to be like everyone else she’s ever surrounded herself with outside of the D.E.O. and Kara. It’s always been aliens, science and everything that could be connected to it. It’s always been about someone else, about being the best.

J’onn’s hand returns to her shoulder, squeezes it a bit before he moves to sit at his desk, pushes a box of chocos at Alex as she takes a seat in front of him. She shakes her head, pushes them away, slightly nauseated.

“You’re projecting, Agent Danvers, and quite frankly, if I can feel it then so can a number of our prisoners here.”

She shrugs but works to pull her emotions in. She doesn’t need a bunch of inmates picking at her psyche when she can barely function without wanting to hit something. Hard.

J’onn nods, letting her know that she’s done it, and she slumps in her seat, eyes closed. She’s so tired, her energy gone now that she has nothing to fuel it.

“You were reckless today, Alex. As much as we could have lost Supergirl, we could have lost you too.”

“That wouldn’t have happened.” She snorts, the thought coming to her before she can stop herself from speaking. “Kara wouldn’t let it happen.”

She doesn’t say that she doesn’t deserve it, that her choices have moved her so far from Kara that they might as well part ways here and now. She doesn’t say that a part of her is still angry with the other woman, that she’s still angry with herself for the distance between them, a distance she won’t bridge unless Kara is willing to do the same.

“Perhaps, but what if she wasn’t there? What if it was just Detective Sawyer? Or if it was a routine mission without Supergirl?”

Alex curls her fists in her lap but she doesn’t say anything, knows that she can’t reply to that. J’onn would know the truth before she could think of a lie anyway, so she stays silent.

“You’re too reckless on the field Alex, and until you can learn to control yourself, you’re benched. From now until I say so, you’re confined to the D.E.O. building when on active duty.”

“No.”

J’onn raises his eyebrow, pushes the chocos towards her again. She takes one, bites into it angrily.

“It’s an order, Agent.” He slumps a little in his seat, his eyes softening. “I don’t know what’s going on with you Alex, but I’m not going to lose you to yourself.”

Left unsaid is the reminder of the family he’s lost, the family he’ll never get back. Shame burns through Alex at that, the fight draining out of her as she forces herself to stay still. She wants to reach out, to offer him comfort, somehow, but she doesn’t know if it’s the time for it.

She offers a nod, instead, tired, empty now.

* * *

 

Maggie looks tired when she gets in, her shoulders slumped, movements slow. Alex shifts on the couch, waits for her to drop down onto it and curl up on top of her like she usually does.

Her warmth isn’t the heat she’s used to, the heat she misses most, but it’s comforting nonetheless. Wrapping her arms around her girlfriend, she hugs her close, inhales coconut and something absurdly floral beneath the smell of gunmetal and smoke they both wear.

“Your sister is comfier than you,” Maggie mumbles into her stomach, causing Alex to huff a laugh. “She looks it anyway.”

“She’s like sunshine embodied. Of course she looks comfier too. It’s totally unfair.”

“Mm. If we weren’t dating and she wasn’t with that fratboy, I’d totally try to compare.”

Something twists in Alex’s stomach at the implication, something dark and ugly that she tries to ignore.

“Right.”

Maggie pulls back, lips curled into a smirk.

“Are you jealous, Danvers? Seriously?”

She shrugs, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s too tired to come up with a reply, to process the tangled mess that she and Kara are now.

Maggie seems to get the message, kisses her softly, sweetly, as she runs her fingers through Alex’s hair. It leaves her feeling less heavy, a little dazed.

“Don’t worry about those things. You have me for as long as we can be together and not a moment less, okay?”

Alex nods, clears her throat as she closes her eyes. This has to be enough, has to be all that she wants.

“How was she?” she asks, deciding to change the subject. “I couldn’t get a good look at how fast she was healing when she woke up.”

“Tired, in pain. We didn’t really talk much. Just sat there in silence. It was nice.”

“Kara? Quiet?”

“Yeah.” Maggie pulls back to look at her. “Something wrong?”

“I should go over there.”

She moves to get up, but Maggie forces her down, sits on her lap. She’s still warm, but there’s something else there, a warning, maybe. Alex isn’t sure.

“I don’t think she’d want that,” her girlfriend says. “I think she really just wanted to be alone, but Mon-El’s there, so what do I know?”

Alex bristles at that, wants more than ever to find her way to Kara, to hold her close and soothe the pain away. She knows how she gets, what she needs, knows that she’d probably asked Mon-El to stay away.

Maggie’s fingers work to uncurl her fists, to get her to relax. She doesn’t want to, but she finds herself letting it happen, the tension still there but muted, somehow, as if the feel of lips brushing over her knuckles is enough to make her forget, for a moment, that the world exists outside of her own apartment.

It’s enough for her to sink into Maggie, to let her take away some of the hurt, if only for a few minutes at a time.

* * *

 

“You don’t like him.”

Alex looks up from where she’s running her latest simulation of some kind of vehicle R&D had sent to her, brows furrowed.  Maggie is pointing at her with a spoon covered in blindingly white vegan ice cream, the accusation hanging in the air between them.

“Who?”

“Mon-El. Mr. I’ve-been-in-love-with-Kara-but-sleeping-with-everything-female-in-my-vicinity?”

Alex shrugs, returning to her work. She’s not sure it’s her place to say anything, the anger from the previous night still boiling beneath the surface. She doesn’t want to feel that again, not right now when she feels so empty of anything.

“What does he have to do with anything?”

Maggie circles the table, sits next to her. They’re not as close as the usually are, not when Alex closes herself off like this, not when she wants to be left alone to bury herself in her work and just forget all the things Maggie hasn’t managed to chase away from her thoughts.

“You don’t like him for Kara.”

Alex laughs. It’s bitter, almost, a cruel sound in her own ears.

“I pushed her to him. After all, who better for Kara than someone from her own kind?”

The words sound familiar, off. She knows where she’s heard them, knows what they mean, but she brushes the thought away.

“Alex…”

“No, I…sorry.” She closes the laptop, leans back in her seat and closes her eyes as she stretches her arms out. Her muscles are stiff, hours of work catching up on her until she wishes she could have Kara’s fingers digging into her back, working the tension away. Rolling her head, she opens her eyes to look at Maggie. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. I’m just…Kara and I made our choices. I should…I should learn to let her fall on her own instead of trying to save her all the time.”

She sighs.

“We should both learn to do that, I guess.”

* * *

 

Her father is in the lab when she gets in, his eyes focused on something she can’t quite decipher from where she’s standing. She takes a moment to observe, to watch as he bites down on his pen while he reads, the way he rubs the pages of the report before turning them.

It’s all so familiar, the way he reminds her of herself just then. It’s a part of her that she doesn’t have to hide anymore, the way she aches to be like him.

“Are you just going to stand there or are you going to ask?”

He doesn’t look up from his reading but Alex can hear the grin in his voice. Setting her things down, she makes her way over, glances at the report, frowning when her own words stare back at her.

“I did this yesterday. What…?”

Jeremiah turns to her, eyes twinkling.

“I wanted to know what you’d gotten up to here. Turns out, you’ve done brilliant work on my original theses. Can’t say I’m surprised but I wanted to know more about your original work.” He gestures to the report. “I’m happy to see you’ve branched out a bit.”

She grins, basking in her father’s praise. If it doesn’t quite feel as it did when she used to imagine it after he’d been taken, Alex ignores it, pushes it aside to focus on the here and now, on her father and having him back where he belongs.

Jeremiah reaches out to her, runs his hand up and down her back absently as he explains where she can improve, and Alex leans into her father’s touch. She won’t admit to it, will never say it out loud, but she’s missed this the most, missed the way he would casually touch her, reassure her of his presence when she needs it most.

“If we directed the anti-viral to work with these genes, it might just work,” she finds herself saying after a while. “Human immunity to alien diseases could be achievable soon.”

Her father nods, claps her on the back one last time before pulling away. Alex feels the loss of it like a cold wind against her back, shrugs it off. Everything seems cold lately, or most everything.

In her pocket, she still has the remains of a crystal lost months ago, a beacon found destroyed at the scene of a memory she refuses to acknowledge. She can feel the jagged edges begging for her blood, for a price paid in everything she would have given once upon a time. She can feel it calling for something that’s no longer her place to give and it cuts into her with the sharpness of every word she’s said to Kara in the last few days.

“Agent Danvers, the reports you asked for?”

Alex pulls her hand out of her pocket quickly, taking the files being offered by the agent who’s just entered her office. He’s nervous, shifting from foot to foot. There’s a familiar energy that reminds her of Kara, of the thirteen year old who had never known how to approach her, the sixteen year old fidgeting as she talked about her first date, the woman who had just saved her life after her flight nearly crashed.

She flips through them as she dismisses the agent, frowns as she reads. There’s something wrong with the data, something she can’t pinpoint no matter how much she scans, but she doesn’t know what to look for.

“Dad, are you going to be okay here? I need to check up on something with J’onn.”

Her father waves her off, engrossed in her notes about sub-atomic reactors and Andromedan races. It’s an out that she takes eagerly, all but running to find the director before she can act on the information at hand.

It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, not that she doesn’t want him to know, but this is Kara. This is the girl she’d once given her entire life to protect. This is her…this is her responsibility. It doesn’t go away just because she’s created a chasm as deep as the ocean between them that she can’t cross.

It doesn’t go away just because Kara’s chosen a boy over her, over them.

She finds J’onn pacing the comms center, his gaze sharp as he directs a mission she should be on, a mission that she has to be on. It shouldn’t matter that she’s been less than careful lately, shouldn’t matter that she doesn’t think her life is worth as much as Kara’s, as her father’s. She should be there.

“Agent Danvers?” He turns to her, eyebrow raised. “Is there a problem?”

She shakes herself then, forces her thoughts to the background as she proffers the folder she’d reorganized while reading. She reminds herself that J’onn cares, that he’s only looking out for her. It helps to slow her breathing, to calm her a little.

“There’s been a complication. I can’t find where the error is but I know that the results are off by at least ten percent.” She flips through the pages, points to where she’d noticed the numbers stop making sense. “See here? It can’t be a coincidence that CADMUS starts moving as soon as these flares begin, but there’s nothing there to suggest an anomaly of any kind.”

“And your suspicions are based on what, exactly, Agent Danvers?”

She shifts, tries to keep her eyes off of the screen.

“Kara flared that day. She didn’t mention it until later, but it was that day specifically.”

J’onn nods, already reading, but she can tell that he doesn’t understand it either, that he can’t make the connections that are escaping her. His brows furrow as he goes through the information again and again, but there’s nothing there, nothing that she can recognize in his expression.

Finally, he looks up at her after what feels like an eternity, looks at her with open suspicion, not at her but at the area around them. Snapping the file shut, he motions her towards her office, closing and locking the door when he gets there behind her.

“Did you look at these before today?”

“No sir.”

“There’s evidence of tampering. These are reprints of the original files, files that were supposed to be readouts and automatic calculations from our systems. Whoever they were, they managed to spoof enough data to make it untraceable, except for that one detail.”

“Sir?”

She knows what that means, knows what he’s trying to say, but she needs him to ask, needs J’onn to give her this himself. He nods to her as he hands her back the file.

It’s all she gets, but it has to be enough, needs to be enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Alex. Things are happening people.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a sort of freedom, she thinks, to flying like this that she can’t get anywhere else. There’s something there that slows her thoughts, pushes her to the limits of endurance while gently pulling her mind in until she can only feel the way the air presses down on her, tries to force her back to the ground, back to where J’onn, Alex and Jeremiah are running field tests.

She’s almost orbital now, so close to the stars that Kara can feel the void pulling at her, beckoning in a counter-melody to the call of the earth. Just a few more miles and she could be there again, could free herself of the burden of Kara Danvers, cease to exist.

“Supergirl, you need to get back down here.” Alex’s voice is an echo in her ear, a static ridden, distorted sound that gets lost in the frenzy of thoughts and emotions it induces. “You’ll breach atmo in two minutes. You really need to get back down here before you go orbital.”

She doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to have to go there, to face Alex again when she knows, knows that this thing between them won’t heal. She doesn’t want to have to deal with the feelings that overwhelms her when she’s around the other woman now, the fear.

He flight down is a slow thing. Kara controls her rate of acceleration, limits it as she descends. She’s not eager to be back on earth, not eager to see Alex, to go home to Mon-El. She just wants to fly, to forget for a second that this is her life, that everything is falling apart slowly as she feels like she’s losing more and more of herself.

J’onn rises to meet her, but she shakes her head, levels out her speed until there’s a steady descent. When she lands, it’s not with her usual force, not with the kind of strength she usually enjoys exhibiting.

Kara flinches when Alex approaches, not wanting to be touched. She shies away from her, ignores whatever expression must be on her face as she strips off the sensors from her body.

“I could have gone another thirty minutes,” she says without looking at them. “There wasn’t a reason to stop.”

Alex’s voice is soft when she speaks. In another time, it would have been calming, but now it just fans the embers of a long buried rage, starts a slow flame of anger.

“You were going to breach the atmosphere in two minutes, maybe less Kara. We can’t have you going orbital on us like that during a speed run.”

“I can hold my breath long enough to get back here, Alex. And it’s not like I’d give you a reason to have to come get me like some idiot kid during a standard test.”

Her fists curl in and she has to force herself to breathe. She’s not going to give in, not going to lash out the way she did on red kryptonite, the way she did when she’d attacked Non so long ago. She’s gotten past that, gotten past her rage-fueled outbursts.

“Kara, this isn’t about—”

“If that’s enough data for you, I need to go, J’onn. I have to get back before Snapper steals my article and gives it away. _Again_.”

She doesn’t want to explain that she’s only going because there’s nothing left to her here, doesn’t want to explain that she feels like her skin is sliding off of her bones under Alex’s gaze. It feels too much like being dissected, like C.A.D.M.U.S. trying to make her flare again.

She doesn’t wait to be dismissed, doesn’t wait for Alex or J’onn to say anything before taking off, pushing herself to the limits to make it back to work on time. She’s tired enough as it is, slower than she’s used to being, and all she can think is that she needs to rest, to stop for a moment, but she can’t.

* * *

 

Snapper isn’t happy when she turns up late to work, but she doesn’t listen to his admonitions. He has never actually been happy with anything she does, so what’s the difference now? What makes it unlike the other times that she’s listened to his scolding and his corrections?

She listens dutifully, takes the notes he wants her to take before retreating to her office. Another day, another article on Lena Luthor, she thinks as she types. At least this time she won’t have to visit, won’t have to pretend that she’s entirely okay around her.

Her fingers stutter against the keyboard as she types, forces herself into a relatively human speed. She’s struggling to remember the ways the letters form around the words in her head, the linguistic differences between Kryptahniuo and English swirling together until she’s not quite sure what they are.

Consonants and vowels blend together, forcing Kara to lean back, to blink away the spots in her vision as she clutches her stomach. Something isn’t right, isn’t normal. There’s something so inherently wrong with the way her body is functioning that she has to hold back a sob as she stands, packs her things quickly.

With a murmured excuse to the nearest senior reporter, she runs, barely makes it to the bathroom before she’s throwing up. Bile burns a path up her throat, forces a sob out of her mouth as she holds onto the sink with a grip weaker than it usually is.

There’s something inside of her, something that’s making her weak, making her more human than she has ever been. Fumbling in her pocket, she pulls out her phone, manages to send off a shaky, typo ridden text before her knees buckle beneath her, hit the cold tiles as she sinks to the ground.

* * *

 

She’s not sure how much time passes in there, not sure how long it’s been before strong, tanned arms wrap around her. She sinks into familiar, silk clothes and the scent of the desert, listens to a heartbeat only recently learnt and never forgotten.

“Hey,” that wonderful, wanted voice whispers. “I have you, Kara. It’s alright now. I have you.”

She responds by curling into her, pressing her face into her chest until her head quiets down. The wrongness, the feeling of something so corrupted it hurts, is still there but this is something she wants, something she needs.

“Come on,” she says, helping Kara to stand. “We’ve go to get you to J’onn.”

Kara shakes her head, fights against her saviour as much as she can, but it’s no use. She’s too weak and there’s not enough strength left in her body to resist for too long.

Eventually, she gives up, lets herself be led out. If there are whispers about it, she doesn’t care, can’t care. She’s tired and she hurts and all she wants is to curl into herself and close her eyes. She doesn’t want more than that, not now.

* * *

 

Lucy Lane’s glorious return to National City brings a weak, delirious Kara with her. Alex is pissed, mad that she’s touching her so familiarly, arm wrapped around Kara’s waist as she holds her close, too close, when she can’t do it herself. She’s angry that something is wrong and yet Kara won’t come to her for help.

Lucy holds her with care, with an attention to detail that lets her pick up on Kara’s distress before it’s voiced. Watching her, Alex can see it in the way she’s constantly shifting, minute movements that allow her to put herself in a position to support her better, to make it so that Kara isn’t in pain when she moves.

It makes her want to punch something, makes her want to march up to her, pull Kara away and into her own arms, but her father is at her side and she remembers, then, why she isn’t there, why she’s not the one Kara is leaning on.

“Alex!”

Lucy’s eyes are wide, worried as she motions to where Kara is vomiting blood into a hastily provided bucket. She’s weak, pale, as if the energy is being sucked out of her and, for a moment, Alex panics. This isn’t supposed to happen. Kara’s not supposed to get sick like this.

“What happened?” she asks, rushing over to where they’re taking her into the med station and beginning to pull on a pair of gloves. When Lucy hesitates, she scowls. “Come on, Director Lane. I need to know what’s wrong with her before I can begin treatment.”

Kara won’t hold still, won’t let her touch her. Again, shame burns through her, forces her to wonder just how badly she’s messed things up, but she can’t stop. Something is wrong with Kara, something is terrifyingly wrong, and she needs to fix this, needs to fix everything she can with this beautiful, lonely girl’s body before she can think about if she’s worth salvaging their relationship for.

As Lucy rattles off Kara’s symptoms, Alex grabs her arms, faltering for a moment when she notices how weak she seems to be. Her fingers leave bruises on her skin, making her nauseous. This isn’t supposed to be happening, isn’t supposed to be something that can happen.

“Get me sedative KrX-27,” she instructs one of her lab rats, grabs the syringe as soon as he hands it to her. “I’m so so sorry, Kar.”

She jabs Kara in the neck with it, changes her hold so that she’s supporting her as she pushes more of the substance into her body.

“What the fuck are you doing, Danvers?”

“Language, Director,” she mutters as she throws the syringe into a nearby waste bin, hoists Kara into her arms fully. “It’s not going to hurt her.”

She holds Kara close, notes the way her body is going cold quickly. She’s helpless enough as it is, not equipped to handle this on top of everything with her father, with the way she can’t look at Maggie without wondering how this woman could get through to Kara when she couldn’t. She can’t lose her like this, can’t lose her before she fixes everything.

Alex motions to Lucy.

“Distract everyone.”

“Alex?”

She can’t tell her. There’s so much concern in Lucy’s voice, for Kara, always for Kara she thinks as she watches the way every agent near her has eyes on the woman in her arms. She’s worried about Kara and Alex can’t tell her that maybe, just maybe she might have chosen the wrong person. She can’t tell her that she’s probably the reason for all of this, that there’s a hole in the D.E.O. that she should have caught before Kara got pulled into it.

Lucy is waiting but Alex can’t tell her.

“Distract everyone, Luce. I’m the only one who can fix this.”

Lucy gazes at her for a long moment, eyes searching.

“Fine, but you owe me Danvers.”

Alex breathes a sigh of relief as she watches Lucy walk out, locks the door behind her and changes her gloves. She cuts open Kara’s shirt, eyes widening at the angry green lines coursing up her stomach, the way they curl around Kara, almost embracing her in cruel energy.

She has to pause, to reorient herself until she’s stable enough to cut. It’s only when her hands stop shaking that she moves, only then that she lets herself pick up the instruments she needs to work.

* * *

 

Kara dreams of a life that’s not her own. She dreams of a boy from the future, an enemy but not an enemy. He’s a friend, she thinks, an ally from the unlikeliest of places but one she’s sure won’t hurt her.

She reaches out, touches the nodes that stand out against his skin. They’re cold to the touch, but comforting, a familiar thing that she can’t define between them. He smiles at her touch, holds her hand close.

“You’re always doing things the hard way, Kara Zor-El.”

“I know you, but how?”

He chuckles, presses a kiss against her skin.

“In another life and another time, we are connected. I don’t know how it works or why, but it’s enabled me to reach out to this version of you.”

She moves her hand away at that, presses it to her side in an effort to forget the way he makes her skin tingle with something she doesn’t expect. If he notices, he doesn’t say anything, just smiles at her with that same knowing smile, though there’s a wicked curve to it that she hadn’t expected from his kind.

Kara pushes it aside, decides to focus on the things she can affect.

“Why am I here? Where is here?”

The boy gestures around him.

“This is your dreamscape. Not as well-developed as the Black Mercy’s version, I’ll admit, but it has a homey feel. Is this your apartment?”

She looks around, notes the familiar muted colours and the way it feels too closed in sometimes. She shifts, uncomfortable with this invasion of Alex’s home even in her private mind, feels unwelcomed here even when she knows that it isn’t real.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Yeah…you still haven’t told me why I’m here.”

The boy taps out a rhythm on the counter between them, blinks slowly as he says, “You’re dying.”

“What?!”

She can’t be dying, can’t be drifting into Rao’s light already. This isn’t her choice, isn’t a time she’s chosen and it’s so unfair that she can’t help but feel the same rage she’d felt so many months ago when she’d been drugged by Lord, his synthetic kryptonite colouring her every action.

“Please don’t punch the marbletop. I’ve been told that that this kind is particularly expensive.”

“If it’s my mindscape, can’t I just recreate it?”

“Maybe, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Or is that a saying that doesn’t exist in your time?”

“Uh, it exists.”

“Weird. You’d think my world’s Kara would have developed a mindset similar to that. Mostly she punches things. Smart girl but violent.”

Kara shrugs at that. She can’t really judge since she likes punching probably as much as this guy’s Kara does. Then it occurs to her.

“If you have your own Kara then why are you here, talking to me?”

The guy mirrors her shrug.

“I don’t know. I felt your pain across the multiverse for some reason and I’ve always thought highly of you, so why not?”

“Um, maybe because your kind and mine don’t get along?”

“Maybe, but in my dimension the two of us get along pretty well.” He sits on the couch and groans. “This is insanely comfortable. Whoever’s apartment this is, they have good taste.”

There’s something he’s not telling her, something that he’s hiding whenever he talks about his Kara, but she pushes it aside. She just wants to get out of here, get out of Alex’s apartment and back to avoiding her. She doesn’t know how much longer she can take this.

“Did you know that Darkseid hasn’t visited your world yet?”

Kara frowns.

“I did.”

“Then you know that you should be prepared in case he tries. Or in case of Brainiac. There are beings out there stronger than you and your cousin could imagine, Kara Zor-El, and your quest to destroy C.A.D.M.U.S. is catching every single one of their interests.”

“I’m not…we’re not—”

He holds up a hand.

“I’m not saying that you should stop. This is just a warning to be careful. You’ve become very dear to me in my dimension and I’d hate for you to be hurt in any version of your life. I do believe my companions feel the same as they’ve accommodated this breach in the Bleed.”

“I…I thank you, I think?”

She’s confused as to why someone from another dimension, another Earth, would contact her and not Clark. She’s not that important in the grander scheme of things, not part of the League, the Legion, anything. She’s just a small hero, the last of her kind and she can’t do anything.

Looking at him, she has to wonder what makes her so special, what makes it so that she’s the one he’s come to when there are other, much better qualified people to deal with this.

“You’ve once played quite a role in events such as these. That version of you, she died more of a hero than your cousin could ever hope to be.”

“W-what?”

He frowns, seeming to realise what he’s just said.

“My apologies, Kara. It seems like I’ve broken a rule by mentioning that but I only meant to reassure you of your worth.”

She nods, leans into him. He feels safe, somehow. Her mind can’t help but compare this to the way Alex used to feel, the contentment, the way she would just feel like she was herself.

He isn’t as strong as Alex, she can tell from the way his muscles feel against her shoulder, isn’t as ready to move as she always used to be. Alex is more relaxed now, less tense since she’s met Maggie, since she’s gotten Jeremiah back, but Kara misses the fluid strength of her muscles, the constant movement as Alex would shift.

It was almost always subconscious, that movement, almost always as if Alex was never quite still but never quite in action either. It was a state of liminal existence, she thinks, a state of never being one thing or the other that she’d grown used to over the years.

He rubs her arm when she starts to cry, starts to wonder when she’d lost the Alex she used to know. She can’t deal with this without her, can’t deal with the boy’s warnings without Alex by her side, but she’s not sure that she will be. She’s not sure that she will even side with her if her father betrays them, if Jeremiah really has changed.

She’s not sure that she could forgive herself if she has to fight him, if she has to take him away from Alex again. It’s not something she often thinks about, but Darkseid? Brainiac? It’s too much and all she wants is to stay here, to not go back.

She has to, has to return, but she curls into the boy instead. A little more time, she thinks. Just a little more time like this is all she wants.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The character at the end is kind of an OC based on a canon character in the comics. I say kind of an OC because I've never read the comics and barely remember Justice League Unlimited, but here. Have a character who likes Kara but doesn't push because the multiverse matters more.
> 
> Also, breaking the format a little to have that sweet, sweet Alex Danvers, MD, PoV.


	6. Chapter 6

There's a coldness inside of her as she looks at Kara, looks at the way she's stitched up on her table, the way her body refuses to move. She wants to jam her with electricity, bring her back to life like some kind of gorgeous facsimile of Frankenstein's monster, but she knows that she can't, knows that that is the way of madness, of following in C.A.D.M.U.S.'s footsteps.   

Still, she wants to bring her back, to push and push until she can see Kara breathe again. She wants to be sure that her Kara is there, that she's alive and breathing and walking, talking, doing things. Even if she ignores her for the rest of her life, Alex wants that, wants that more than anything in the world at the moment and she needs to find a way to have it, to bring that desire to life.   

Looking around, she starts bringing in the sun lamps. She remembers vaguely the stories Kara used to tell her of the time when Clark had died, of the way he'd been brought back to life by the sun, by the genesis pod she doesn't have access to.   

Alex falters then, makes the mistake of pausing when she should be moving and she drops the equipment in her hands. It falls to the floor with a clatter, but she doesn't see it, doesn't notice when it does, too absorbed in her own thoughts.   

All she's ever wanted is to be happy, to have this little bit of happiness for herself. She's only ever wanted to have Kara by her side, to have her love and her dad and her sister. It's all she's ever wanted and yet she can't seem to hold on to Kara no matter what she does and she has to ask herself if it's worth it, if it's worth the way her hands shake as she puts them on the table besides Kara's and tries to breathe, to make herself process everything that's happening around her.   

She brushes her fingers along Kara's, feels the way the skin still gives way beneath her touch. It's always fascinated her, the way it could do this and then stand up to bullets, some kind of electro-magnetic field that Kara never wanted to explain to her. It's always made her want to poke and prod and find out what it means to be something other than human.   

She traces the patterns in her skin, so different from a human's, from her own, but not noticeably so. She's wanted to draw this before, to see if she could capture in her biology sketches all the differences between herself and Kara, but she'd never been allowed to, never been given the kind of opportunity she has now.   

All it would take, she thinks, is a few minutes, a few moments to herself and she'd have it down. She'd have a perfect replica of those patterns, those differences, to study when she could, to look at, examine and break down until there was nothing left to look at but Kara herself.   

All it would take her would be a few minutes of study for her to find all the things she normally couldn't, a few minutes of just looking at Kara, not as her sister, not as a person she loves, but as a subject of study. It would only take her those moments of separation to get everything she needed.   

 She’s almost completely disgusted with herself for those thoughts, almost past the point of caring that she’s a scientist, that some would say that kind of curiosity is only natural. This is Kara. This is the girl she’s given half her life to protect and she knows, _she knows_ that she should be taking better care of her, that this is her fault somehow.  

The paleness of her skin, the way her body seems to retreat into itself, all point to that, all point to the ways in which she has failed. They all point to the fact that she is not worthy of protecting her, of being at her side, but Alex doesn’t care.  

This is her Kara. This isn't some science experiment she can justify by saying that it's for the greater good. This isn't an autopsy, a look into all the ways that she's failed. It isn't anything but her trying to heal her sister, trying to make up for all that she has done to put a distance between them that she can no longer hide from.  

Her fingers move from her arm to her face and all Alex can do is wonder at the fact that Kara looks so peaceful like this, so at ease with herself when all she feels is this burning need to move, to do something. All she feels is this desire to do all that she can to bring her back and she can't help but wonder if she's failed at this too.  

* * *

 

She comes out of slumber slowly. Kara still isn't awake, still isn't doing anything that looks like breathing, like living, but she can feel the warmth returning to her skin somewhat. It makes her breathe easier, makes her relax just that little bit that she needs to before she can face the rest of the world.  

"I'm sorry," she whispers, bending over her to press her lips to her forehead. "I'm so sorry you got caught up in all of this."  

Outside, she motions to Lucy, asks her to keep Kara safe. She doesn't wait for an answer, doesn't wait for Lucy to acknowledge her in any way before she's headed to the garage, to her bike.  

The ride to the rescue site is a short one. She's memorised every route, made sure of every by-way and narrow lane, every traffic ridden street and abandoned alley, so much so that it's easy to pick her way through them.  

It's empty when she gets there, picked clean. It's almost as if there'd been rats waiting to scurry over the bones of the place, as if it had all been nothing but flesh for them to tear at.  

Alex wrinkles her nose at the metaphor, reminds herself to stop reading Kara's old college works before she goes crazy. She can do without all of this, can do without the reminder that she's only the slightest bit crazy for coming here, for wanting to look into something she's almost sure is nothing.  

She doesn't really understand it anyway, doesn't see how something that was here one moment could be gone the next. It's always been like that with C.A.D.M.U.S., always been a wild goose chase, or a hunt for a white whale that never existed.  

"Damn it, Kara. You need to stop leaving your old books at my apartment."  

She doesn't want to believe that there's nothing there, that she's chasing a ghost. It would be all too convenient for every trace of what this place used to be to disappear. It be too easy for it to just vanish when she needs for there to be something, anything to prove everyone else wrong, to prove that her faith in her father is justified.  

She sighs, turns her flashlight on to begin the search. She doesn't hear the click of the bomb, doesn't feel the shockwave until after she's sent flying and then there's only darkness to be felt, seen, heard.

* * *

 

She wakes with a gasp, tries to get up, only to find herself restrained. She can't move, can't get herself out of that strange place with too bright lights and too dark shadows. She can't hear anything, can't see past the figures hovering over her and the light but she can feel.  

Her nerves are on fire, feels like half her body is missing but she can't catalogue the damage, can't come up with anything that might suggest what it is she feels. Whatever they're pumping into her – and oh how she can feel the way the liquid courses into her – it's messing with her mind, altering her perception until she can't tell her own body from the table she's on.  

"Don't struggle, dear. You'll only make things worse for yourself and we can't have you wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in prosthetics before they can even be fitted. It was hard enough getting these particular models from my daughter without her noticing, after all." 

Alex blanches, knows where she is now. The knowledge of who has her is undeniable now, a  truth she can’t just accept, not like this when everything inside of her is screaming at her to run, to get away as soon as she can.

“Oh, I wouldn’t advise moving, Agent Danvers.” She grits her teeth as Lillian’s voice nears, though the woman stays out of sight. “I’m told the pain of amputation is in itself something that begs for movement to be avoided, and you’re very nearly approaching it already.”

“What are you…where am I?”

“Oh, that would be spoiling the game and I’m playing to win, Alexandra. Rather, you should be asking who you’re with, or who’s with your precious sister.”

Alex struggles harder clenching her jaw against the pain that seeps in almost as soon as she starts to move again. She needs to get out of there, to find a way back to the DEO, back to Kara before everything can go to hell. She needs to find a way to escape that doesn’t involve being stabbed by one of the C.A.D.M.U.S. doctors operating on her.

She looks around but she’s blinded by the light above, blinded by the searing white she can’t seem to escape from. It makes her vision spot, makes her wish she’d thought to keep her eyes closed, but even now that will not help her.

Instead, she tries to lash out, to kick out or something, only to find that there’s nothing where her leg ued to be. She can’t feel a thing, can’t will herself to move the way she’s used to everyday. She can’t will herself to fight back against Lillian’s goons.

She tries her hand and there’s sensation on that side, but none on the other. It makes her worry, makes her wish she could see, but her right eye won’t open and they have her head strapped down. She’s blind and disabled, unable to do anything but lie there and pray that Kara remembers her, that Kara will look for her when everything in her is screaming that she doesn’t deserve it.

* * *

 

She floats in and out of consciousness, makes no effort to stay awake. The pain is too much, burning a path through what remnants of her body she can feel. There’s nothing to tell her how long she’s endured this, how much longer she will have to endure it. There’s nothing to tell her if the flow of time even exists.

At some point, she thinks about crawling, about sacrificing her dignity and just dragging her body out of there, but she's strapped in. She can't escape, even if she'd had the energy and the will to do so. Whatever Lillian is planning for her, she has no way of escaping it, of returning to Kara like she so desperately needs to.

* * *

 

There's a moment when she thinks she sees her father, a moment when she thinks he looks at her the same way he used to when she was younger. Her mind is clouded, drugged, but she swears she sees him, sees the moment when he realises she's awake and looking around.

A hallucination, she thinks. He's nothing more than an illusion conjured up by her mind to bring her some form of comfort when she needs it most because he can't be here, can't be working with Lillian Luthor when she knows he's good, knows he means no harm to anyone she cares about, but that's it, isn't it?

He won't hurt anyone _she_ cares about, but what about everyone else? What about the others out there? Those that Kara would give her life to protect?

It's a corrupted parallel of her own work, her own life's purpose. She's never cared before this year about the lives of other aliens besides those she's called her own, never given them more thought than to question if they were good or bad. She’s never had to, not when she was so far removed from it all, so far removed from the city that it didn't even matter if they were there or not.

She sees her father and she sobs, cries for all the ways she's failed Kara by rejecting her, not listening to her when she should have been her number one champion. She cries for the space she's put between them for a lie, for something that had not been real, no matter how  much she had wanted to believe it was.

* * *

 

Kara wakes slowly. It's not the kind of waking that's pleasant, not the kind that leaves a person with fond memories of sleep and the dreams that got them through the night.

No, this is rough and unwelcome. It's the kind of waking that makes her want to go back to sleep, back to a world she can actually control as opposed to this one, to this world where nothing makes sense without Alex there to help her.

She sits up, blinks slowly as she tries to get her bearings. The last thing she remembers is the bathroom at CatCo, the feeling of wrongness in her stomach.  She remembers the S.O.S. she'd sent to Lucy and then nothing.

She looks around slowly, tries to figure out where she is. The room is vaguely familiar, a memory niggling at her mind, but she can't figure it out, can't solve the mystery of where she is or why.

She gets up off the bed, looks around for a second. It's difficult to move, lines across her body pulling where there should be none. She sighs, looks down. There are stitches and traces of green everywhere, a look that will fade in time, will give when the last of the green, of the Kryptonite, she remembers, disappears.

She thinks of the man from her dream, of the warning he had brought with him. She remembers the old stories, of worlds destroyed to feed a dark hunger that was never satisfied, never sated. They made her spine chill, made her want to hide under the covers when she was much younger than she is now. 

At this point, they make her angry, make her question why everything has to perish to slacken a thirst that will never die. They make her want to hit something, to punch her way to a solution that does not exist on this world when there should be one.

Mostly, the stories make her want Alex, make her want her with a ferocity that scares her more than anything else that exists. They make her wish she'd never let go when she should have stayed, should have supported her instead of questioning every decision she'd made about Jeremiah because she gets it.

She gets what it’s like to want to believe in someone so hard that you’re willing to blind yourself to their mistakes, gets what it’s like to look at a parent and want to believe that they represent the ultimate good. She gets it, understands Alex in a way no one else does, but she doesn’t know if Alex cares about that, if she remembers it. She doesn’t know if she remembers that Kara herself knows what she’s been through, knows what losing someone like Jeremiah, only to find them is like.

Her fists clench and she walks out of the room, realizes where she is. She wonders if Alex is here, if she even cares that Kara needed her, that she needs her still.

“Kara! You’re awake.”

She glances to the side, smiles slowly at Lucy, still groggy. It’s been so long since she’s seen her, been so long since they’ve shared the same space, and all she can think is finally. Finally, she has her best friend at her side again and all she wants is to keep her there, to keep her in the same place in her heart she kept Alex when she used let Kara be there. She still keeps her there, but, in that moment, she’s willing to forget.

* * *

 

They come in the night to take her away. She's been measuring time through the small window she's been allowed to see the world through, to see nothing but sky. Alex imagines this is Lillian’s way of saying here, watch as you're left behind by even the air above you.

Only, she won't let it work, won't allow them to take her faith in Kara away. She'll wake up soon, come find her. She'll bring the help that Alex begrudgingly admits she needs now that she can't get out herself, and she'll take her somewhere safe, somewhere she can mourn in peace.

She can't tell where they take her but she memorises the directions anyway, memorises the twists and turns until she's back in the room with the lights again. It's cold, this operating theatre, and she imagines it to be sterile. It has to be to meet the standards of a woman like Lillian, a woman who will leave nothing to chance, leave nothing to fate when she could control it.

Alex understands that well, has seen it before in her own demons, her own memories of Astra, of the woman who could have raised Kara had she just _known_ , and what then? Would they have ever met? Would she even know her now? Or would she have been oblivious to her?

The machines they hook her up to are blissfully silent. She isn't sure if she could handle the constant beeping and whirring in that moment, isn't sure she won't do something painfully desperate in that moment just to escape. 

“Are you ready, Dr. Danvers?” one of the surgeons surrounding her asks. “We need you to be aware, this is going to be painful.”

“Fuck you.”

There's a laugh and then her screams begin.


	7. Chapter 7

The screams are the first thing she hears when she steps outside. Kara knows that voice, knows what it sounds like when she laughs, when she cries and shouts and begs. She knows what she sounds like in almost every situation but this, knows her every sound, every one of them but her screams.

They tear through her, force her to her knees as she hears, no, listens to them. She wants to move, to go to Alex wherever she is, but her body is frozen, is stuck in place as she is forced to listen to her precious sister scream out in an agony that neither of them seems able to escape.

She has to crawl to the door, has to haul herself up using a wall she destroys several times before she can stand. The sounds Alex makes now aren’t natural, aren’t anything Kara wants to hear but she forces herself to listen, to try to find her before they can end.

If they stop, it means she’s failed. It means that Alex isn’t there for her to regain what they had before. If they stop, it means that Alex is no more and that is a thought Kara isn’t able to go through with, isn’t able to allow herself to think without breaking down.

She listens and listens and listens but she can’t focus long enough to find her. She can’t listen long enough to make herself move. At some point, J’onn comes out, tries to help her, but she shrugs him off, makes as if to take off only to fall again. She’s still weak, still not up to what she should be, but Alex needs her, needs saving in a way she hasn’t needed saving in a long time.

It makes her stagger, makes her close her eyes tight as she forces herself to her feet. She has to do this, has to get up. If she doesn’t get up she isn’t the hero Alex needs. If she doesn’t get up then Alex leaves her again and, for all the distance between them, she can’t lose her like that, can’t risk not seeing her every day at the D.E.O., at least.

When she takes off, it’s a stuttering, failing thing. She nearly falls more times than she can count but Kara persists, forces herself to move as she lets herself be drawn in by the screams, by the cries that she never wants to hear ever again.

_“Either you’re a part of this family or you’re not!”_

The words ring in her ears again and again as Kara flies but she shakes her head, tries to get clear of them. She can’t let herself be distracted by the sentiment behind those words, can’t let herself be distracted by the things that they never talk about even when they need to.

Alex needs her, needs a hero. She needs Kara to be present, to choose her again and again if she’s going to live and it’s all Kara can do to not break down, to not let the tears cloud her eyes as she cries.

“Alex, where are you?” she whispers into the night air, hoping her words will reach her, will show her the way to her sister. “Where are you being kept Alex? I need to know. Just give me something please.”

She begs the air but it’s no use. There’s nothing but screams, nothing but unfiltered sound escaping from Alex’s body to reach her ears over miles and miles of city in every direction. She can’t find her, can’t focus long enough on the present to get to her, but she needs to.

This is something she can’t rely on the others for. It’s something that she needs to do on her own, because this is her sister. This is her Alex and she won’t let anyone else save her when she has the power to do so.

It’s almost a mercy when the screams stop, almost but not quite. Instead of thoughts of saving her, Kara is plagued with what ifs and prayers to be on time, to not have failed her. Instead of hope, there is only despair and she is so close to giving in that it’s almost impossible to think because of it, almost impossible to let it go in order to find her.

Then they start again and Kara is thrown into another cycle of fruitless hope. She wants and wants and wants but no matter what she does, the sound bounces off of walls, scatters through the city until she can’t focus long enough to actually discover where they might be coming from.

She wants to go to J’onn, wants to beg him for his help now, but it’s no use, not when she’s determined to find her before the screams stop again. She has to find her, has to get to her before that time, but she doesn’t know how, doesn’t know what it means to locate the one person who grounds her when she isn’t there to do just that.

“Breathe, Supergirl. You can’t work like this if you’re all messed up inside, can you?”

“Lucy?” Her voice is small, weak. She almost stops midair, but she can’t, not when everything rides on her being fast enough. “Lucy, what are you…?”

There’s a chuckle on the other end, the shuffling of something, papers she thinks. Lucy must still be at the D.E.O. then, maybe in the command hub or somewhere else she can communicate from.

“I’m here to help. We’re here to help, so tell us what you need, okay?”

“O-Okay. I need…I need to find her.”

“Who?”

“Alex. Alex is screaming, Luce. It can’t be inside of my head because I’ve never heard her like this.”

There’s a sigh, more rustling and rushed commands in the background. She has to close her eyes against the need to switch off her comm link, to stop herself from abandoning the help being offered to her and just do something, anything she can without help.

“Okay, so Danvers is definitely not at home or anywhere she usually hangs out.”

“I _know_ that, Lucy.”

“Hey, no need to get snippy with me, missy. I’m on your side, remember?”

She has to breathe in, to force herself to remember that. All she can think is about Alex and it’s messing with her mind, making her say and do things that she normally wouldn’t.

“Right, sorry. I’m just on edge. Can you help me?”

“That’s what we’re here for but before that, there’s a bogey on your six, a drone of some sort.”

Kara spins around, sees the lights of the mechanical thing following her. She swallows, climbs through the air in an attempt to shake it, but it follows her. Without thinking, she changes course, zig zags through the city in an effort to lose it but it’s no use. It’s still on her tail, as if it’s programmed to her specifically.

Knowing her luck, she thinks, she wouldn’t be surprised if that was the truth, wouldn’t be surprised to think that someone had designed this thing with her in mind. Shaking her head of such thoughts, she turns, tries to face it head on but it ducks her attempts at heat vision, stays too far out of her reach for her to be able to do anything with her fists.

“Oh come on!”

Angry now, angrier with each attempt at evasion that it successfully makes, Kara moves close, is hit with a bright green light that burns a hole through her shoulder. She wants to throw up then, the smell of her own blood filling her nostrils until she can barely breathe for it.

With the next shot, she falters in her flight path, starts to fall. Part of her wonders if the world would be alright with this, if everyone would forgive her for giving up here, for giving in when she has nothing left inside of her to give.

She wants it to stop, wants all the ruin and the mistakes to end so that she can just rest, just forget that any of this exists and find somewhere to land, to go into Rao’s light and just not be herself anymore. She thinks she’s wanted that for a while now, maybe hours, maybe days, maybe years.

The only thing that’s ever held her in place, that’s ever stopped her from giving up has been Alex and now she doesn’t even have that anymore. She doesn’t even have her when she needs her most and isn’t that the most ironic thing of all.

Alex…

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognizes the way her wounds hurt, recognizes that pushing it when this thing, this machine, is pumping her full of kryptonite is a dangerous act in itself. She recognizes that she shouldn’t push too hard lest everything falls apart in front of her but she doesn’t care.

She needs to get to Alex, needs to save her before she loses her forever. That’s the only thought she has when she ignores Lucy’s voice, flies straight into the drone’s flight path and pushes her arm through its body, ripping the kryptonite core out of it without thought.

Dispassionately, she watches as it falls apart beneath the force of her blow, watches the pieces descend to the city below. She thinks she should care to investigate, but she doesn’t, not when she recognizes the symbol on the core, the symbol she’d pushed her fist through when she’d punched through the body.

Sluggishly, Kara flies out into the open sea, drops the core into the water as she stares at the disappearing glow of the green. Part of her wonders if she’ll always be plagued by that colour, if it will never regain a purer, less dangerous meaning, but she squashes that part beneath thoughts of Alex, of the screaming that still echoes in her ears.

She reaches up and taps the comm link.

“Do you have my coordinates?”

“Kara? Are you okay? What happened? Is everything fine?”

She lets out a ragged breath, surveys the mess that is her uniform. Winn is going to hate her for this when she gets back, if she gets back. She thinks that she might not survive it if Alex doesn’t make it.

“I…yeah. A little beaten up. Do you think you can track my coordinates?”

“Yes. We have them right now.”

“Good. There’s a chunk of kryptonite on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Just thought you should know.”

Lucy’s laughter is hysterical. “Just thought we should know?”

“Lucy…” Her voice is strained, Alex’s screams cutting to her core now. “Please…”

A sigh, then something clicking in the background. “Okay, Vasquez says the signal is the same kind that Vartox used to contact you last year, but more specific, which is why only you can hear it. It’s bouncing off a bunch of different cell towers but we think we’ve managed to isolate it.”

“I…okay. Think you can give me directions?”

“Yeah, just go where I tell you to, okay?”

* * *

 

When Kara lands, she’s met with nothing. If they’re expecting her, there’s no sign of it, only an empty lobby and an even emptier building. She frowns, has to remind herself that Vasquez is even better than Winn at this sort of thing and she would never lead her wrong, not with this, not with Alex.

She scans the building but comes up with nothing, even though Alex’s screams are still echoing in her ears, louder now, a cacophony of agony. It makes her anxious, makes her want to search more and faster for her, but she knows that she has to be careful, can’t let herself be wild with this.

She moves forward, body aching. The drone had managed to get more shots in than it missed and she can feel the infection setting in, corroding her body slowly. When she finds Alex she’ll get her out of there, get her to safety and maybe then she can let go, can say goodbye without faltering this time. After all, there’s no coming back from this, is there?

Kara shuffles on the spot, forces herself to listen. The screams echo around the room but they’re clearer now, more recognizable now that they aren’t being bounced around the city. She looks around, concentrates her sight on the walls and floors but there is nothing to be seen there, only empty rooms and a solid darkness she can’t see through below her.

She furrows her brow, looks at the floor again. She wonders, for a moment, why she can’t see through it, only for realization to hit her. She wants to smack herself in the head for not seeing it sooner, for letting her despair get the best of her when she knows that she shouldn’t be like this.

Kara scans the floor, looks for something, anything, with her micro-vision that might give her a clue as to where to go. There isn’t anything that can help her but she doesn’t stop looking, doesn’t stop trying to find an opening where she can get to Alex.

She taps her comm link again.

“V, can you help me with something?”

“Of course ma’am.”

“There’s a building…um,” she pauses, looking around until she finds a sign with the building’s name on it. “Manhattan Genetics. Can you get a blue print of it? I think there’s lead beneath the floor because I can’t see through it.”

“Pulling it up now. There are at least three levels below the lobby, ma’am. If you use the elevator on the south end, you should be able to key in a specific code to get to the floors below.  I’m accessing the system now and…the code is 041940, ma’am.”

“Thanks V.”

“No problem. And ma’am? Bring agent Danvers back.”

Kara nods grimly, heads to the elevator Vasquez told her about, looks for the keypad. At first, she doesn’t see it, but a quick scan of the area shows it hidden behind a panel to her right. She swears beneath her breath when she sees the trap they’ve set for her using her electromagnetic vision, has to take a moment to control her shaking hands before she carefully inputs the code Vasquez gave her.

Avoiding detection isn’t easy, but she tries anyway, hopes that she hasn’t missed anything as the elevator goes down. The ride is short but it feels like forever, feels like it’s never going to end even though it takes maybe a minute to get to her destination.

When she steps out, she looks around, notes the way the floor and ceiling are made of lead, reinforced so that she can’t see into the floors above and below her. It doesn’t matter though, not when she can see through the walls, can see what C.A.D.M.U.S. has been up to under their noses.

At first, she sees nothing, but then she notices it. There’s a small room on the far end of the building, something akin to the genesis chambers they used to use on Krypton in the Codex. Only, there’s something wrong, something not quite right about it that draws her attention. She moves closer, sees the figure in it sleeping.

There’s something familiar about him, something that makes her ache for this boy she’s found in her search for Alex. She makes quick work of freeing him, checking to see if he’s alive, breathing out when she discovers that he’s still sleeping. She hauls him back to the elevator, stores him inside before moving on to the next floor.

Alarms go off when she steps out, personnel scurrying back and forth. It’s clear that this is only a skeleton staff that she passes as she wanders through the facility. They don’t pay her any attention and for once, she’s grateful for that as she walks, eyes focused on where she can see Alex, can see the shell of what her sister used to be.

When she gets to the room, she wants to vomit. Alex has been hastily bandaged but it’s clear that she’s missing an eye, missing an arm and a leg on opposite sides of her body. She moves slowly, approaches her carefully, but it doesn’t matter when the intercom comes alive, static deafening her for a moment before Lillian’s voice filters through.

“I see you’ve found our rejects.”

She looks around, frowns. “What have you done to them?”

“The same thing I’ve tried to do to my other solders: give them the means to defend themselves from the threat that you and your gaudy cousin represent to this planet.”

“You mean you hurt them.”

“Hurt them? Hardly. The boy is lucky. He’ll likely never wake up, a defective product to be discarded, just like your sister. We tried to give her a new life, but she rejected every prosthetic we tried to attach. I suppose you’d say something poetic and wishy washy. The power of love for her sister or something like that but really. Alexandra is as defective as my darling daughter, perhaps more so for her willing association with you.”

Kara grits her teeth, ignores her as she unhooks Alex from the machines. Lillian says nothing else but Kara knows what that means, knows what it means when Alex’s breathing becomes shallower than it had been when she’d first entered the room.

“Don’t give up on me yet, Alex. We’re supposed to make up and have girls’ night in and I’m supposed to steal your potstickers and you are not dying on me, do you hear me?”

She growls as she flashes to the elevator, picks the boy up and flies through the shaft into the lobby. She has no time for this, has no time to play around at whatever it is that Lillian has planned when these two need medical attention.

The flight back is hard, made difficult by the extra weight and her weakened state, but she won’t stop, won’t let up until she’s there, until she’s zipping through the D.E.O. and dropping them onto individual beds. Only then does she stop, does she look at herself and wonder at the state of her body before fainting, succumbing to the weakness suffused through her body by the Kryptonite infection.


	8. Chapter 8

She wakes as they hit the air, eye opening groggily to see a blur of blonde and blue. Alex can’t focus her sight, can’t make herself see more than she’s already able to, but she’s almost sure that this is Kara, almost sure that her sister is the one carrying her when she isn’t worth it, isn’t worth the effort it takes to rescue her from a situation she’d entered into herself.

She wants to fight, wants to tell her that she should have just left her there, left her to rot when Alex knows that she’s endangered them for nothing but it’s too high. It’s too high and Kara’s grip is too bruising, too familiar for her to do much more than flail a bit before clinging to her with her remaining arm. It’s too high for her to yell at her, to ask her why she would put herself in danger like that when Kara is worth so much more than her.

Instead, she clings to her, presses her nose into Kara’s uniform and inhales. She still smells like the D.E.O.’s medical unit, still smells to clean, too sterile, but Alex doesn’t care. She just wants to be close to Kara in that moment, to feel that she’s real under her, that she’s there and solid and everything Alex needs. She doesn’t think she’ll make it otherwise, doesn’t think she can survive this without her, survive what she needs to do when they land.

Kara is careful with her, holds her tightly with one arm while she supports another body on her back that Alex can barely make out. She’s curious, but she doesn’t have the strength, doesn’t have the energy to reach over, to get a better look than she currently has. That she can even be awake right now, can hold onto Kara with as tight a grip as she is, is a miracle on its own, a special thing that she can’t quite get through without wanting to laugh, loud and wild.

Kara dives and Alex scrambles to hold on, to grab her with an arm that is no longer there. When she realizes, she does flail, would fall had it not been for Kara’s speed and strength. If Kara asks, she’ll blame the wind for the tears in her eyes, but the realization of her body’s betrayal, of the way she’s had everything taken from her hurts, hurts more than she wants to admit to.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to do that.”

There’s something in Kara’s voice, something that makes Alex’s heart sink as she realizes just how much she’s hurt her, how much it must burn Kara to have to apologise to her when they haven’t talked about it, haven’t done anything but avoid each other since that day if they can. It must burn her to know that even now, even now Alex expects her to save her, wants her to be the one to pull her out of trouble if she can.

She rubs her head against her, wraps, her arm around her neck. She wants to climb, to bury her face in Kara’s neck and just feel her against her, but Alex knows that she can’t. She knows that Kara doesn’t need the distraction, doesn’t need her to take away her refuge when she’s already intruding, already forcing her way into something that she doesn’t belong in, something that she’ll never be a part of.

“Gonna dive again.”

That Kara has to warn her makes her feel sick, makes her wonder just how badly they’re hurt, how badly she’s hurt, that it’s necessary, that it’s something that needs to be said. She wonders when they’d become like this, when everything had fallen apart so thoroughly, but she knows, can’t help but know the truth.

“Be careful, Kara. You can fall.”

“Haven’t I fallen already?”

Alex doesn’t know what to make of that, doesn’t know how to reply to that when they’ve never spoken about it, pushed that incident to the back of their minds until it seemed like they had forgotten about it, had forgotten what it was like to know what the truth was. She doesn’t know what to make of the way Kara says it, like there’s something inevitable about that, something that she can’t stop, no matter how much she wants to.

She reaches up, presses on Kara’s shoulder for leverage before nuzzling her neck. Kara falters, almost falls then, but she rights herself in time, forces herself to fly steady when it’s clear to Alex that she’s anything but. She’d feel bad about, feel guilty about the way she makes Kara unstable, but she can’t let herself be when all she knows is that her sister is here, that her sister is holding her as they return home, as if she’s the most precious thing Kara will ever carry.

“Calm down, Supergirl,” she whispers, fingers massaging her neck as they hover. “Move slowly, so that all three of us don’t fall, okay?”

“Alex…”

She doesn’t know why, but there’s a note of pleading in Kara’s voice, something that pulls at her despite everything inside of her begging for her to get away from Kara, pull away before Alex can hurt her again. It pushes her closer to Kara, pushes her to kiss her cheek, rub the skin beneath her fingers before nuzzling her again.

She knows that she shouldn’t, knows that Kara needs to concentrate, but she needs to be close to her, needs to be reassured that she’s there, that she’s safe and whole and everything that Alex can’t be anymore. She needs to know that she hasn’t ruined her yet, hasn’t ruined her the way she’s afraid she will with all the lies, the fights and the disagreements between them that seems to have worn a chasm between them so deep she doesn’t know how to  get across.

Still, she stays close to her, pushes herself into Kara as they fly until they’re touching down at the D.E.O., Kara handing her and the other person, a boy so familiar to her, to the medical team. She watches her step back, eyes blurring again with tears as she tries and fails to reach for her. If Kara notices this, there’s no indication of it and Alex is forced to drop her hand, to fall back onto the stretcher, exhausted.

There’s a hand on her shoulder and she looks up to see Lucy staring down at her. There’s something unreadable in her expression, something like steel and a desperation to do something that Alex can’t figure out. Lucy has always been Kara’s friend, has always been the force that kept her sister safe when she couldn’t, and to have her look at her like that, to look at her like she cares about what happens to Alex is unsettling, is something she can’t quite deal with.

She turns away from her, directs her gaze to Kara and the way she can’t look at her. She wants to reach out, to hold her like she always does, but she can’t. She doesn’t think Kara would let her and that hurts more than anything else, hurts more than the missing limbs and the pain from the lacerations all over her body.

When they start wheeling her to medical, Alex grits her teeth but she can’t stop the way her heart speeds up, can’t stop herself from panicking as they enter the cold, sterile room that she’s to be housed in. She can still remember the way she felt helpless in that bed, the way she’d been strapped down when the screams wouldn’t stop and shocked until her body couldn’t handle it anymore.

She swallows the bile back, allows the doctors to poke and prod at her as they please while she counts the half-life of every radioactive element that she can remember. When that doesn’t work, she stares at the ceiling, tries to dissociate herself from the way her body seems to hate her so much.

If it works, Alex doesn’t know, can’t tell with the way her body shuts down and darkness creeps at the edges of her vision. She tries to fight it, tries to stay awake, but in the end she can’t.

* * *

 

There’s a scream that echoes through the D.E.O. There’s a release of anger and anguish that has Alex sitting up in terror as she scrambles for a gun that isn’t there anymore, tries to get out of bed and falls when she forgets about her leg. She hits the ground with a dull thud and it’s all she can do to try to get up, to try to stand when there’s nothing there to support her.

Strong hands grip her under her arm and she’s hauled back into bed. She wants to protest, to scream that she has to get to Kara, but there’s something dark in Lucy’s expression, something that has her closing her mouth before the words can come out. There’s something there that makes her shrink, makes her follow instructions without question despite wanting to run, to find Kara and figure out what’s wrong with her.

Lucy presses a glass into her hand when she begins to hyperventilate, forces her to breathe as she focuses on the coldness of the material. She presses her fingers against it, feels the ridges and bumps along the sides until she can calm down, looks at Lucy in question.

“Kara says she’s not the only one that gets panic attacks, just that you hide them better. Figured you’d need something to focus on.”

“It hasn’t happened in years and it wasn’t happening now.” She presses the glass against her forehead, lets the coolness sink into her skin for a moment as she leans back in bed, eyes closed. “Kara worries too much over things that she really shouldn’t be thinking about.”

“So I’ve heard.” There’s the sound of something shuffling and Lucy taking a seat. “What happened out there Alex? V said your tracker disappeared at the exact same moment there was an explosion in the area where Jeremiah was found.”

Alex shrugs. “Got injured, got captured, got tortured. What else is there to say?”

“Danvers…”

Alex sighs. “What do you want me to say? They tortured me, tried to turn me into one of their pet monsters and then decided that I was total garbage when the prosthetics wouldn’t take, which, by the way, someone should warn Luthor about. If it wasn’t for Kara, I would have died in that bed they had me in.”

“So you didn’t notice anything? Didn’t see anything that might help us find out where they are?”

Alex sighs, shakes her head. She’d been too out of it to notice anything, too preoccupied with her pain and trying to escape to think properly. Maybe if she hadn’t been, she would have looked around, would have tried harder, but they can’t expect more from her, can’t just expect her to not have her own moments of weakness.

There’s the sound of shuffling near the door and Alex turns her head, opens her eyes. Kara’s showered, wearing Alex’s D.E.O. sweats and pulling at the sleeves of the hoodie. She looks nervous, looks like she’s not sure if she’s welcome, and Alex’s heart breaks, makes her want more than ever to pull her close, comfort her the only way she knows how.

“I’ll leave you two alone then.”

Alex doesn’t wait for Lucy to leave, doesn’t even acknowledge her as she stares at Kara, pushes herself up on the bed to get a better look at her. She doesn’t look good, doesn’t look like the sister she loves so much. She’s too hesitant, too distant and Alex can’t stand it, can’t stand the way she shrinks, makes herself smaller against the door.

“Come here.”

Her voice cracks, but she doesn’t care. This is Kara. She can be vulnerable with her, can be something other than strong and she needs that, needs her sister in a way she hasn’t needed anyone in a long time in that moment. She doesn’t care if she has to beg. Alex just needs her, needs the reassurance that she hasn’t killed her yet, hasn’t failed to save her.

Kara pushes off the door, makes her way over to the bed. There’s something there that she hates, something more than the hesitance she keeps seeing that makes her seethe, but she doesn’t let Kara see it. She doesn’t want to scare her any more than she already seems to be, doesn’t want her to run off because she’s made the wrong move, done the wrong thing too soon, too fast. She needs Kara to stay, to be calm around her, so she keeps her emotions hidden.

When Kara gets close enough, Alex turns, motions to the chair in front of her. Kara sits tentatively, stares at her fingers as she rests them on the bed near the stump of Alex’s lost arm. She reaches out, almost like she can’t believe it, Alex thinks, and then she’s pulling away, shaking her head as she tries to get up and leave.

Alex reaches out then, grabs her hand and pulls her until Kara is tumbling over onto the bed. She giggles a little, wrapping her arm around her waist and breathing her in. Kara smells like rain, like the night air and everything that reminds her of a storm off of the coast. It’s familiar, comforting in a way she hasn’t felt in nearly a year and it’s all Alex can do not to break down then.

Kara’s fingers come up to her eye, traces the line of the bandages with gentle touches and something like misplaced reverence. Alex wants to stop her, to tell her that it’s not like that, that she doesn’t deserve it, but she can’t. It’s been so long since she’s actually touched Kara, been touched by her, and she doesn’t want it to stop, doesn’t want to lose her just yet.

So, she lets her touch her, lets her press her forehead against hers as her tears fall on Alex’s cheek. It’s all she can do to rub her back, to whisper soothing words to her when she can barely keep her head from spinning with the effort of it all. That Kara is even this close is a miracle after everything she’s done to her, the way they’ve treated each other. That she wants to be this close is a blessing Alex won’t take for granted, won’t question when she could have been so far away instead.

Kara leans in, kisses her forehead, her cheeks. She brushes her lips against Alex’s remaining eye and she lets out a breath, lets herself feel the weight of what’s been done to her as she allows herself to hold Kara close, to cling to her like Kara herself used to when they were kids. That the positions are reversed isn’t lost on her but Alex doesn’t care when Kara is above her, is pressing against her in a way she hasn’t in a long time.

“I’ve missed you.”

Kara nuzzles her, stays quiet as she runs her nose along Alex’s throat before dropping to her side and hugging her close. Her grip is strong, would be bruising if she applied any more pressure, but Alex doesn’t mind, doesn’t care that this is a woman who could break her if she wanted. All that matters is that Kara is here, that she’s so close when she’d been so far before.

She reaches up, runs her fingers through Kara’s hair and sighs. She knows that she shouldn’t be doing this, that Kara shouldn’t be the one to need reassurance, but she can’t help herself. She can’t stop herself from whispering to her, making promises that she’s not sure she can keep. She can’t stop herself from wanting to be closer to her when she should know better, should know that this is bordering on something it shouldn’t be.

Kara sinks into her side further and she has to fight the urge to curl into her for a moment. They’re coming close to territory that they shouldn’t enter, shouldn’t even think about, but Alex can’t bring herself to care all that much as Kara snuggles into her.

“Hey, I’m here.”

Kara shakes her head. “Could have lost you today. Nearly lost you today.”

Alex swallows at that, turns completely and looks into Kara’s eyes. They’re so blue and she can’t help but feel herself staring, trying to catalogue every difference that she can see with her remaining eye. It’s not much but she smiles when she catches familiar patterns.

She reaches out, strokes Kara’s cheek, trying to ignore how strange it feels to not have her other arm between them. She tries to ignore how much it feels like a loss she can’t recover from, like something irretrievable.

“You’ll never lose me, I promise.” She tries to shift closer. “We’re in this together Kara. We watch each other’s backs and make sure we get home alright, remember? That’s who we are and I’m never going to let you lose that, even if I have to stay at the D.E.O. and direct your missions from the command center.”

Kara’s laugh is watery. “You’d probably end up in the field on crunches with J’onn hovering behind you, ready to catch you.”

Alex laughs, rubs her nose against Kara’s. “Yeah, he would do that, wouldn’t he?”

“He’s our space dad. He has to take care of us or he’ll curl up and become grumpy all day.”

Alex sighs against her, runs her fingers down Kara’s sides. There’s something wrong with her, something that she can’t pinpoint in the tenseness of her muscles, but she’s glad that Kara’s fighting whatever urge it is that she’s dealing with. She’s glad that she’s trying to put it aside and just be with her when she needs her most because this hurts, hurts more than she wants to think about and she needs her alien. She needs to feel Kara there, to be assured that she’s safe.

They both need each other and Alex isn’t sure she can let go anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

Alex is warm beneath her hand. This is important, probably the most important thing at the moment. She thinks about that and shakes her head when she moves her hand from her stomach to her heart. No, the heat isn’t as important as this, as the beat of her heart as she turns into her in her sleep.

There’s some grumbling and then teeth attempt to sink into her shoulder. She scrunches her nose, pushes Alex lightly as she tries to figure out a way to get out from under her mouth without hurting her, but Alex won’t let her. Her grip is too strong, too desperate, and Kara finds herself curling into her further, wrapping her arm around her, as if in doing so she can keep her away from the things that would hurt her the most.

The words come slowly as she sings, presses her nose to Alex’s hair. It’s an old lullaby, one she can only remember in the dead of night when she thinks about Astra, about that eternal night in the Phantom Zone. She remembers it only when she needs to and right now, it’s the only thing keeping her from getting up, from running as far away as she can get.

“Alex…”

She nuzzles her, shifts until she can be face to face with her sister. Alex wakes slowly, blinks at her before looking away. Kara sighs, runs her fingers though Alex’s hair as she leans forward and kisses her cheek.

“You’re safe, Alex. I brought you back and now you’re safe.”

She repeats that like a mantra, a promise that she’s afraid to let go off. She doesn’t care that it makes her look whiny, pathetic; that it makes her look weak. Alex is more important, is everything to her, and she’s tired of not being with her anymore, tired of the fighting and the constant distance that keeps her away from her.

She kisses her forehead again, turns onto her back and pulls Alex with her as she moves. Her weight is weird now, off, and there’s something that breaks inside of Kara at such a loss. Alex used to be familiar, used to be the one constant she could count on, and now she’s not. Now she’s something that she doesn’t recognize.

Her sister hides her face in her shoulder, presses her forehead against her, and all Kara can do is stroke her hair, scratch the back of her neck until Alex is practically purring on top of her. She grins at that, keeps doing it as she stares at the ceiling, wills the tears away.

“You’re gonna get your dream, Alex.”

“To surf all the way to Antarctica?” Her voice is muffled, hoarse. “I don’t think it works that way Kara. Only penguins are allowed to do that, apparently.”

Kara scrunches up her nose. Winn might be proud of what she just said, but she isn’t.

“Bad movie reference?”

“Bad movie reference.”

Alex huffs a laugh, kisses her shoulder as she shifts a little, tries and fails to get up. Kara’s heart breaks as Alex curls on top of her, lets her tears fall then. Her voice cracks as she speaks.

“You’re gonna get a prosthetic, and you’ll probably be able to store your guns in there. And you can get a laser eye, and a rocket arm, and…and…”

She chokes a little, covers her mouth with her hand as she moves away from Alex. She needs a minute, needs time to be able to face her without remembering what happened to her, but she doesn’t know if she can leave her alone, if she can so easily abandon her when everything in her is screaming for her to stay, to hold her and never let go.

“Kara…”

Alex’s voice has her moving back to her side immediately, has her pulling her closer. She runs her fingers through her hair, kisses her face as she murmurs words to soothe her. Alex is shaking, her pulse increasing with each moment that passes, and all Kara can do is hope that her efforts are working, that her words and touch are enough to get her through this.

* * *

 

Lena is uncomfortable. She can see that as soon as she sits, can see the way she tenses around this many aliens acting without care for their identity. She knows that it’s probably a little cruel to have her meet her here, probably a little like rubbing it in her face that they’re here, that they’re not leaving, but she doesn’t care. She wants to be comfortable, and not having to pretend that she’s human is more than she has at the moment.

Kara orders for them, a scotch for Lena and the weakest alcohol they have for herself. Darla looks at her with a raised eyebrow but she shakes her head, motions with her hands that she’s fine. She doesn’t want to start anything, not now while she still has to think about Alex, about all the things they still have to work out.

She drains her drink before ordering another, looks around before sighing. She really shouldn’t do any of this, really should wait until Alex can make these decisions for herself, but she doesn’t want to let her sister suffer any more than she has to.

“Are you alright Kara?”

Lena sounds so concerned, so ready to find something, some way to comfort her if she needs it, that Kara can’t help but break, can’t help but cover her eyes with her hands and cry.

Her sister isn’t whole and it’s her fault, her doing.

A hand on hers, fingers tangling together as they pull her hands away from her face. Lena is looking at her softly, concerned, but she doesn’t care in that moment. She just wants to be held, just wants Alex to reassure her, to tell her that everything is okay, but she can’t. She’s lying in bed, hurt and broken and half the person she used to be, and all she can think is that it’s her fault.

She wants to run, to fly back to her, but she doesn’t move, silently shaking as she continues to cry in that bar. She wants to laugh at how ridiculous she must look, at how insane it is that she’s here when Alex needs her, when Alex is lying in a bed, unable to even move, while she’s out drinking and letting Lena comfort her.

She isn’t the one that needs it, isn’t the one that should be comforted just then, but she steals it anyway, lets Lena comfort her in a way that only she can, because this is too much. This is more than she can handle, the idea of losing Alex more than she ever wants to think about when a world without her is her worst nightmare now. A world where she can’t turn to her, can’t smile and reassure herself that Alex is there, that she’s safe, is not one she wants, and it hurts to think that she might not get that, that she might not ever get that again.

She sighs, lets herself feel the tension in Lena’s muscles as she tries to hug her. It’s all too clear that she’s forgotten how to do this, how to let herself be human, but Kara doesn’t care. She needs this comfort, needs it in a way that she can’t find with Mon-El, with Lucy.

“Hey, it will be okay. Whatever it is, whatever’s hurting you, it will be okay.” She rubs her back, presses her nose against her neck. “You can talk to me about this, whatever this is. You know I’m here for you.”

She nods against her, pushes herself further into Lena. She can’t do this alone, can’t do this without someone, but the person she needs the most is the person she can’t talk to and it _hurts_. It hurts so much that she doesn’t want to think about it any more than she has to.

“I…I…I need help.”

Lena nods. “Of course. Anything you need.”

“I…” She pulls away and looks down. Asking her to help look for information is one thing, but this is something else entirely, something she hates to do right now. “I…I need…”

“Kara, what is it?”

“Alex was..was…” She shakes her head. “I need you to come with me.”

* * *

 

Alex is glaring at her. She’s not looking at her, but she can feel it, can feel the way her eyes narrow and center on her while she stands next to Lena, lets her poke and prod her until there’s nothing left but to tell her what’s going on.

“I…I brought Lena to see you.”

“I can see that.” She shifts, sits up with a grunt. “Have you lost your mind Kara? We don’t even know if she’s trustworthy and you’re just letting her walk into the D.E.O. like it’s nothing?”

Kara doesn’t look up, reaches back for Lena’s hand and tangles their fingers together. She’s tired of this, of having to defend her friend when all Lena has ever done is try to be there for her, try to be there when she asks. She’s tired of having to defend herself for trusting her when everyone else won’t.

“You did it with Maggie.”

“What?”

She flinches, doesn’t want to look up at Alex. She’s back to being scared, to wanting to run as far as she can before she drops from exertion. Kara doesn’t want to say it again, not when Maggie’s helped her, but she can’t help but feel bitter about it.

“You brought Maggie here before we knew that she was…that she was trustworthy.”

“Kara, stop.”

She looks at Lena sharply, shakes her head. “No, I’m tired of this. I’m tired of no one trusting Lena, of everyone telling me that my judgement is wrong and that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m tired of having to defend you when you’ve done nothing to earn this kind of hate and mistrust.”

“You can’t just bring people in willy nilly like this.”

Kara nods, looks away. “ _I_ can’t bring people in. I get it.”

“Kara…”

She shakes her head, pulls Lena with her as she leaves the room, leans against the wall and sinks to the floor. She doesn’t know what to do anymore, doesn’t know how much more of this she can take.

“Are you alright? Maybe you should go back in there?”

“Danvers is being stubborn and Kara is just as bad. They’ll both pine and look at each other sadly until nobody can ignore it and only then will they even think about talking to each other, not that they will. They’ll just sacrifice themselves instead of doing the healthy thing and having a conversation.” Lucy steps forward, offers her hand. “You’re Lex’s little sister.”

“And you’re the Lane who never gets the kind of attention Lois does.”

Lucy smirks, looks her over. “You have more guts than I thought you would. Come on, let’s go grab some coffee.”

* * *

 

Kara watches as Lena and Lucy talk, watches the way they bond together and wishes, wants. She doesn’t know what it is that she wants, but she does and she feels it deeply.

She looks at them, stares out of the open door as agents walk past. Everything looks so normal, looks so simple, but Kara feels like she’s falling apart, like there’s nothing inside of her that’s going to be the same again. She feels like there’s something burning and twisting inside if her and she can’t get it out, can’t escape from it when all she wants to do is run.

Lena looks over, strokes her hand while Lucy gets up to sit next to her. An arm goes around her shoulder and she’s pulled into Lucy’s side, pressed against her in a tight embrace.

“She’s going to be fine, Kara,” she says into her hair. “Alex is…annoyingly strong. She’ll survive this and then everything will be okay again.”

She doesn’t want to tell her that she’s wrong, doesn’t want to tell Lucy that nothing’s okay, but the words are on the tip of her tongue, waiting to fall out. She doesn’t want to say that there’s nothing to be done now, that everything is too broken, but she can’t stop herself when the words come pouring out of her.

Tears trail down her cheeks as she looks down, can’t face her best friends as she tells them that nothing can be fixed, can be resolved and put back the way it was before. She can’t face them as she finally lets herself see just how broken they are, how broken she and Alex have always been, even before this, before Jeremiah and Mon-El and Maggie.

Lena rubs her arm, trails her hand down to tangle their fingers together. She feels grounded then, feels like everything is settling down in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time.

Lena isn’t Alex, can never be Alex. She’s too little the kind of protector that her sister is, too little the warrior scientist and more the politician, but she calms her in the same way, focuses her in a way that very few can.

She shakes her head, squeezes her fingers once, twice. She feels better now, feels safer than she’s felt in a while, but she can’t stay like this all the time, can’t rely on Lena for everything. She can’t rely on Lena for the comfort that only Alex can give her in this moment, no matter how much the other woman is willing to give her.

It’s not fair to her, not fair to Lucy either. She doesn’t want to put this on them when this is her fault, is her doing. She doesn’t want them to hold the weight of her burdens when she knows that this is something that only she can fix.

Still, it’s nice to feel it, nice to feel the way they surround her, give her the sort of comfort she’s missed in recent months. It’s nice to have this sisterhood with someone other than Alex, to know that there are people who won’t leave her, will stay with her when Alex can’t.

It’s nice to know that they’re just there.

* * *

 

It’s dark when she gets home, her apartment seemingly empty at such a late hour. She can’t remember when last she’d been there, can’t remember the last time she’d seen the inside of her own apartment before the fainting, the dream with that man, that Brainiac that knew her. She can’t remember the last time she’d been here before Alex.

Kara sighs as she drops onto the couch, leans her head back to stare up at the ceiling. She wishes there was something she could do, something she had control over, but there’s nothing, no one she can turn to to make this right. There’s no one who can help her make things right again when all she wants is to forget that the world has taken so much more from Alex than she should have to give.

_.dhagier-u wis rrup eh us-kah kir_

_;zuhne awuhkhu zhadif kryp w rrup ehm duahz-es kryp w kryp I dhehraoghehd-o_

She whispers the words into the dark, lets them run free in the night air. Her uncle had whispered those words into Kal’s hair before sending him away, before letting him go somewhere he couldn’t follow, but she doesn’t have the strength to do the same for Alex. She doesn’t have the strength to send her off into the unknown when all she wants is to hold on to her, to keep her safe and secret from all the things hiding in the dark.

She lets herself cry again, lets herself curl up on her couch and sob into her arms as she finally feels how much she misses Alex. She misses her so much, feels as if there’s a part of her that she can’t get back until Alex is safe, is whole again, except…

She’ll never be whole, never be the same Alex she’s known for half her life, and it hurts. It hurts to know that she could have stopped this if she’d swallowed her pride, let herself get swept up into the emotion of Jeremiah’s return instead of listening to Winn, to Mon-El, but she can’t. She can’t ignore everything she knows for Alex, and having to choose hurts more than the choice itself.

She sighs, wipes at her eyes. She feels like she’s spent the entire day crying, feels like she’s empty of any feeling, suddenly. Everything disappears, all of a sudden, goes numb as she sits there in the dark. She feels nothing, feels only emptiness as she pushes off from the couch and goes about her nightly routine.

She can feel again in the morning, can let herself become engulfed in everything that’s happened during the day, but now she can’t, won’t let herself feel anything if only so she can sleep.

“You’re late.”

She closes her eyes, bites her lip to keep from groaning in despair. She doesn’t want to do this right now, doesn’t want to see him, but she doesn’t have a choice when Mon-El grips her shoulder, pulls her around to face him.

“You said you’d be home early yesterday, Kara. What the hell?”

She looks down, away. He’s mad, so mad, and it’s her fault, her doing. She feels guilty, feels like she should have been better, should have done more, but she doesn’t know what, doesn’t know how she could have been better. She doesn’t know how to appease him with anything other than the truth.

“I was with Alex. She…she needed me.”

He scoffs. “Alex has Sawyer. She doesn’t need you, Kara, not the way that I do.”

She flinches, nods. She knows that, knows that Alex has Maggie, has someone who isn’t her.

“Hey,” he says, voice softening, even as his grip remains strong, too strong. “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I just lost my temper because I miss you so much, but you know what? If you can make it up to me, we’ll be good, yeah?”

She swallows, nods as he starts to undo his belt. This she can do. This she can be, has to be. This is all she has left and she’ll do anything to keep it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Kryptonian used here is the first two lines of Jor-El's blessing from _Superman: The Movie_. They translate to:
> 
>  
> 
> _You will travel far, my little one._
> 
> _But we will never leave you, even in the face of our deaths._
> 
>  
> 
> And can be found [here](http://kryptonian.info/doyle/translations/jor-els-blessing.html).


End file.
